Trovo

» see trovo.live as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed trovo. by 2020 i was 36 with a full-time job in computer vision and live-streaming culture had become a thing for people one or two career stages behind me. i had a twitch account from a friend's stream years earlier, used it twice, never logged in again. when tencent launched trovo in july 2020 as a twitch alternative i registered the name and moved on. by the time it shut down on june 30 2026 my account had not been opened once.

trovo started life in early 2020 as madcat, a private beta of a tencent-built streaming platform aimed at the western market. tencent had owned riot games (league of legends) since 2011 and was acquiring or funding most of the big western publishers by 2020. live video was the missing piece. madcat became trovo in july 2020 with a public launch in the united states, then expanded into europe and southeast asia through the rest of the year.

the launch came with a reported $30 million creator partnership program designed to poach streamers from twitch. trovo paid signing bonuses and let partners keep a higher revenue share than twitch's standard split. for about eighteen months that worked. some midcat twitch streamers moved over. mixer refugees (microsoft had killed that platform in july 2020, six weeks before trovo launched) had nowhere else to land.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

trovo's interface looked like a twitch clone with a chinese livestream tip-jar grafted onto it. instead of bits there were mana tokens. instead of channel subscriptions there was an ace package. the chat sat on the right side of the player and the directory hung off the top. anyone who had ever opened twitch could use it without thinking.

the chinese-app surface (animated emojis with ten tiers of cosmetic gifting on top of a working mobile sdk on day one) was the closest a western streaming product got to the douyin or huya playbook. it just did not matter. western audiences were already on twitch and youtube gaming. discovery on a brand-new platform was zero. partners burned through their bonuses and most of them quietly drifted back.

~ what got buried with it ~

by 2024 trovo had stopped meaningful partner recruitment. it kept running on a maintenance budget for two more years. tencent's official line in the march 2026 closure announcement was that the company was reallocating resources to its core gaming and entertainment businesses. translation: the experiment had not worked and there was no path to a sustainable user base outside china.

trovo joins a long row of dead twitch-competitors. justin.tv (twitch's own ancestor, shut down 2014). hitbox / smashcast (folded 2017). mixer (microsoft, dead july 2020). caffeine (last funding 2019, then an ad-tier rebrand 2022). and now trovo. the live-streaming category has remained a near-monopoly for over a decade and every well-funded challenger has folded inside five to seven years. tencent's twitch run lasted six.

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