Some of the most pervasive images of our time are Twitch emotes—who among us hasn’t said “poggers” in real life? A decade-old icon of streaming is now on its way out, however, as the BibleThump emote reaches the end of its licensing period and Twitch searches for a replacement.
The news that BibleThump would soon be disappearing broke just yesterday. It was, perhaps, unavoidable: While the crying, cartoonish face has grown synonymous with expressing sadness in your favorite streamer’s Twitch chat, it in fact originates from roguelike indie darling The Binding of Isaac. As such, Twitch originally agreed to use it through a limited licensing agreement, and now that agreement is ending, it’s time to find something to take its place. No statement about their plans to replace BibleThump was included with that initial announcement, but now Twitch has turned to the community for help.
A recent post on X (formerly Twitter) from Twitch laid out its plan to fill the Isaac-shaped hole in its emote roster, asking user to vote between three replacement sad faces. The three pretenders to the throne—BigSad, UnBearable, and LayersOfSad respectively—unfortunately don’t hold a candle to the original, looking just a little too clean and overproduced to match the deliberate crunchiness of Isaac’s art style. There’s probably a bigger statement to be made here about how this represents the increasing corporatization of the streaming space, but regardless of any larger metaphor, Twitch’s audience isn’t taking this well.
The post’s replies are filled with responses decrying the proposed replacements and urging Twitch to renew the rights to the original emote and keep using it. Surely, though, this is an impossible task, or Twitch would have done it already—right?
Not really. Binding of Isaac creator and BibleThump rights holder Edmund McMillen has gone on record to state that he’s “100% fine with coming up with a good solution to keep or modify the emote” but that it’s ultimately “up to [Twitch].”
With this in mind, it seems to be more a case of Twitch wanting to save money rather than any kind of insurmountable obstacle, and it’s not being received well. It’s probably cheaper to create a new emote in-house than simply renting one, after all, but when it comes at the cost of getting rid of a piece of streaming history, it just might be more prudent to simply eat the loss.
