Twitch has suffered a major data breach, with hackers releasing more than 125 gigabytes of data from the Amazon-owned platform used by millions to live stream video game sessions and other activities.
The data includes source code for the Twitch website as well as for Twitch desktop, mobile and console clients. Also found in the data? Code for an unannounced, unreleased game store called Vapour that appears to be Amazon’s answer to Steam or the Epic Games Store.
According to folks who have pored over the leaked data, Vapor seems to have many of the features you’d expect from a modern game store as well as Twitch-specific features like Emotes (the platforms’ name for a type of emoticon).
It’s unclear for now whether Vapour is a work-in-progress that Amazon and Twitch plan to release one day, a project the company is exploring, or something that’s been canceled. But it does raise interesting questions about just how far Amazon wants to travel down the path of copying Valve’s Steam platform – maybe we’ll see a Steam Deck-like Twitch Deck handheld game console with Vapour integration one day? Stranger things have happened.
Grabbed Vapor, the codename for Amazon’s Steam competitor. Seems to intigrate most of Twitch’s features as well as a bunch of game specific support like fortnite and pubg.
Also includes some Unity code for a game called Vapeworld, which I assume is some sort of VR chat thing. pic.twitter.com/4KeeEOspyQ— Sinoc (@Sinoc229) October 6, 2021
That said, while it’s interesting to see a hint of possible things to come in the Twitch data breach, if you have a Twitch account, now might be a good time to change your password, even though no password data appears to have been leaked (yet).
You might want to change it again in the future though. Twitch says it’s investigating the data breach and will provide updates “as soon as additional information is available“, but at this point it’s unclear if the vulnerability that allowed hackers to obtain this massive trove of data has been patched yet.
Grabbed Vapor, the codename for Amazon’s Steam competitor. Seems to intigrate most of Twitch’s features as well as a bunch of game specific support like fortnite and pubg.
Also includes some Unity code for a game called Vapeworld, which I assume is some sort of VR chat thing. pic.twitter.com/4KeeEOspyQ— Sinoc (@Sinoc229) October 6, 2021
Update: Twitch says the breach was possible “due to an error in a Twitch server configuration change that was subsequently accessed by a malicious third party,” and that while there’s “no indication that login credentials have been exposed” the company has reset all stream keys.
I think this thing has the potential to succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and make everyone more miserable than we ever thought possible. At least anyone who didn’t grow up under “you said something wrong, it/you got deleted, that’s how it is, grow up.” The competition can’t offer such tight integration of game streaming, game streaming for an audience, and AWS-subsidized cheap games. VR Chat is highly in demand among those with headsets, but is technically difficult if you want a totally custom avatar, which they could sell to people in micropayments. It depends on Fortnite fading from popularity in favor of something else, and the pandemic fear never ending, however. And Amazon might or might not need to make the obligatory Twitch chat moderation easier on streamers. And they might need their own brand of cheap headset.