The Komodo dragon emote KomodoHype has been chosen to replace PogChamp after Twitch removed the iconic emote due to controversy with the content creator it was inspired from.
On January 6, PogChamp was removed after Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez made statements calling for further violence following the riot at the US Capitol. A few days later, Twitch announced that it would start rotating a new version of PogChamp every day. This meant that many streamers were able to be the new face of the emote.
The Twitch community then voted to crown a new face for the PogChamp emote during a live broadcast. It was revealed on a Twitch stream that the new PogChamp would be KomodoHype.
“It’s always made sense to [Twitch] that if the community votes for what they want to use, that is what will ultimately be the most popular,” Twitch’s Marcus Graham said during the PogChamp selection stream.
KomodoHype was chosen over another popular streamer’s version of the PogChamp emote, UmiNoKaiju.
It seemed that the Twitch community wanted KomodoHype even before Twitch started rotating PogChamp emotes with various streamers’ faces. Movements from social media have led up to the vote of a KomodoHype replacement. Since the removal of the original PogChamp, KomodoHype has been used over 400,000 per day. Between the time that PogChamp was removed and KomodoHype was implemented, the KomodoHype emote was used between 438,000 to over 600,000 times per day.
Twitch has now implemented KomodoHype. Twitch users can still use the old KomodoHype as well as typing in “PogChamp” to get the emote to show. The scaley reptile is a great replacement because of its wide mouth, which resembles a huge smile, marking epic moments in Twitch history.
Fans are happy with the new emote and now streamers across the platform can be free of fear from harassment that some of the featured streamers received, such as Pokémon streamer Reversal, who said he experienced light trolling, and actor and vocalist Omega “CriticaBard” Jones who experienced “hurtful messages and death threats.
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