Today, being simply entertaining to watch may not be enough for many up-and-coming streamers. You may cover all the basics of bringing in the energy, being consistent, and having a schedule, but the streaming scene may still make it hard to keep your new viewers engaged. With so many things happening on any streaming platform, being able to engage your viewers deeper into your content becomes really valuable. This engagement is even more relevant if it’s tied to an increase in revenue.
That’s when tools like Crowd Control may come in handy. Crowd Control is an interesting and innovative tool designed for streamers, especially those focusing on gaming content. It allows for real-time interaction between the streamer and their viewers during a live game stream.
Crowd Control enables viewers to influence the gameplay of the streamer in real-time. This interaction can range from modifying the game’s difficulty, spawning enemies, and providing the streamer with items or buffs, to more humorous effects like inverting the player’s controls.
It supports a wide range of popular games, especially those with a strong single-player focus. This includes classics and modern titles, making it versatile for different types of streams. Its lineup consists of more than 100 games at the moment with many top Twitch categories like GTA V, Minecraft, and Lethal Company among those 100. In its essence, Crowd Control sets up mini-mods for your game that let it communicate directly with your channel points, bits, and more.
It used to be a Twitch first tool, but now your Interaction Portal allows you to use it on any other streaming platform. By allowing the audience to participate in the stream actively, Crowd Control adds an extra layer of engagement and entertainment, making each streaming session unique and unpredictable. This may help you both turn your new viewers into returning ones as well as boost your revenue (Crowd Control revenue split is 80:20).
It’s a great service, but what if you want to dive deeper into the possibilities of viewer-streamer interactions? Or find other ways to monetize your stream this way.
Here are some of the Crowd Control alternatives available right now:
Dixper is a service that connects streamers and their viewers by giving the latter the ability to buy skills that directly impact the streamer’s experience. Skills represent different interactive actions, like manipulating your keyboard and mouse inputs, putting filters on your game or camera, playing jumpscares, and more. While this may not be a direct manipulation of in-game events, Dixper and its community tirelessly create new collections that are themed to fit specific games or activities. Dixper also allows viewers to challenge streamers to hit certain in-game milestones. Streamers can choose to accept a challenge and get a donation if they complete it successfully.
Pros: Dixper collections allow you to be more flexible with the type of content you use them with featuring actions that can go well with a Just Chatting stream or something similar. The collections are heavily customizable, allowing you to pick the lineup of available actions and set prices for them. Dixper also has a fairly active community that helps expand the service. Your revshare can get as low as 90%, although this may require some time. Challenges are a fun addition to your toolkit that is displayed in-game.
Cons: No direct in-game inputs from your viewers. While Dixper skills can certainly impact the way you experience a game, it’s more connected to your input and output than explicitly in-game mechanics. Your starting revshare is at 70% which is OK but may be lower than the competition.
Playstream is a service that lets your users challenge you to complete some in-game goals. It can be used with games like Fortnite, Fallguys, Apex, etc. Streamers can also create custom challenges for any game, although that would require a custom verification from the streamer upon completion. You can also customize how the challenges are displayed in your overlay.
Pros: Revshare starts at 80% and can reach up to 90%. Automatic challenge completion verification is available for some games. Playstream’s team promises to help you with setting things up on their Discord.
Cons: The list of actively supported games is limited. All other challenges require you to review them manually, relying on the streamer’s integrity to work properly and requiring more management from you. The team isn’t very active on socials and its blog.
Check out our InstructBot article for a more thorough review. In its essence, InstructBot is a tool that lets you set up certain control combinations that users can activate using Bits, donations, or channel points. The service also features some additional capabilities like playing sounds, muting your mic, or timing out other chatters. It’s particularly popular among Escape From Tarkov players.
Pros: The toolbox you have is very flexible. You give your viewers a tailored macros library that will work only on certain applications. There is no share of revenue you have to give away. The service is subscription-based, which may be preferable to some people. You can import other people’s commands, making the configuration process a bit easier.
Cons: While there are many things you can do with key combinations, it is otherwise very limited. All your viewers’ actions do is press some key combination for you once or do something else from the limited list of additional commands. This may not end up going through if you don’t have the game window active at the moment or hold some other keys that may interfere with the combination. There is a 30-day free trial, but after that subscription will run you 18 GBP for 6 months or 30 GBP for a year.
This is kind of an outlier here. WizeBot is a very versatile bot that allows you to do a lot of things in all areas related to streaming. Among those things is the ability to create scripts for some in-game actions BUT… only in two games. Yes, you’ve read it right. You can create scripts that can be tied to any action happening on your stream, like donation or subscription, but only in 7 Days to Die or Project Zomboid. The set of commands is also rather limited. You can spawn more zombies or do a couple of other simple actions. Hopefully, WizeBot’s supported games library will expand in the future.
Pros: if you like playing one of the support games, WizeBot offers you an endless toolkit to create a trigger for in-game actions.
Cons: Only two games in the current lineup with a limited action list. A bit of a harder setup process.
That’s pretty much it. If you know of any other service that may serve as a nice Crowd Control alternative, let us know on our socials. We’ll expand this article. While Crowd Control offers some truly unique features, any tool from this list would be a welcome addition to your stream, boosting both its engagement potential and monetization.