What Is Trovo? The Rise and Shutdown of Tencent’s Twitch Rival (2026)

Someone you had been watching on Trovo for a while, and one day the link opens on nothing but a blank page — it is not your connection, and the streamer has not quit. The platform's live service itself has been switched off. This article sets out what Trovo actually was, why it went dark in 2026, and what that says about keeping content on your own machine.

What was Trovo? A Tencent-backed Twitch challenger

Trovo was a game-streaming platform that launched in 2020, backed by Tencent, and it touted a more generous revenue split than Twitch — for a while it was counted among the more credible challengers.

Back then the pitch was easy to follow:

A more generous split: the subscription split it offered was 70/30 (creators keeping 70%), above Twitch's usual 50/50;
Mobile and interactive integrations: it put real work into mobile game streaming and built-in interactive features, which was where it tried to look different;
Low barriers to pull creators in: early on it used creator support programmes to attract streamers who did not want to be tied down by Twitch exclusivity, with Latin America and Southeast Asia as its focus markets.

Put another way, the story it told at the start was "a friendlier Twitch for creators". The ending of that story arrived in 2026.

On 30 June 2026, Trovo shut down live streaming

Trovo's live service closed permanently at 00:00 (GMT+8) on 30 June 2026: the live tab, the go-live feature and subscriptions were all discontinued, and the company said it would not return.

Going by the timeline in Trovo's official support announcement, it unfolded across five points:

31 January: all monetary incentive programmes (including the well-known Trovo 500) were stopped, covering North America, Europe and Latin America — the earliest signal;
1 February: new users were barred from going live, leaving only existing accounts able to stream;
25 March: the formal announcement, naming 30 June as the day live features would go offline, on the stated grounds of focusing better on Trovo's gaming business;
1 April: updates to live features stopped, new streamer onboarding paused, and subscriptions and ACE purchases closed for good;
30 June: the live section disappeared and the live service ended.

One sentence in there carries more weight than any "how many days are replays kept" rule: the company specifically warned that live-related data — VODs, history and chat logs — would be deleted permanently once the statutory retention period ended, and that anyone wanting a recording had to download it before the shutdown.

Why it closed: a set of numbers that does not flatter

The shutdown was not a snap decision but the end of a long slide: in 2025 Trovo's total watch time was down to 51.7 million hours, a 26.5% year-on-year drop.

A few numbers that tell the story:

A 2022 peak of about 140,000 concurrent viewers, the platform's all-time high;
2025 watch time of 51.7 million hours, down 26.5% year on year;
A heavily concentrated audience: by 2026 roughly 78.9% of traffic came from Russia, followed by Belarus and Ukraine, with the top categories clustered around regionally popular titles such as Lineage 2, World of Tanks and Russian Fishing 4.

The problem was not the wider market. Global live streaming was hardly quiet over the same stretch — 2025 saw close to 36.4 billion hours watched worldwide, one of the strongest years on record. The market grew and Trovo shrank, which says it never broke out of a single regional ceiling.

Accounts, balances and recordings: where each one went

A shutdown does not mean the site vanishes overnight: Trovo accounts, levels and friend lists were kept, and the platform pivoted to casual games; live-related content, though, was handled on a separate track.

Per the official announcement, assets and data were dealt with separately:

What stayed: Trovo accounts, casual game data, levels and friend lists were all kept intact, with nothing for users to do;
What kept working: unused Elixir could still be spent inside the platform's casual games; Gems were retained and withdrawals continued;
What disappeared: live-related VODs, history and chat logs were deleted permanently after the statutory retention period, and users were explicitly told to download them themselves before 30 June;
The refund window: refund requests for unspent Elixir were open until 31 August 2026 — that channel has now closed, so anyone who missed it is left with in-platform spending as the only route.

So if you are still looking for the recording of a particular Trovo stream, the reality is this: the platform's own copy is most likely already in the deletion pipeline, and whether it survives depends on whether someone downloaded a copy at the time.

A harsher lesson than "replays expire": keep content on your own machine

Platforms with replay windows are annoying enough; Trovo shows the more extreme case — an entire platform can simply disappear. One is "it expires"; the other is "the platform goes with it", and neither gives you much warning.

For anyone who watches streams, the two risks call for different responses:

On platforms that do have a replay window (Twitch's VODs, for instance, sit in 7/14/60-day tiers), at least you know when it will vanish and can act before the deadline (the details are in our guide to Twitch VOD expiry rules);
When a platform shuts down altogether, the notice is often only two or three months ahead, and anything not downloaded by then simply will not make it — Trovo is the case in point;
So the only approach that really holds up is this: when you see something worth keeping, save a copy to your own machine right then.

Saving stream replays with a desktop video browser like VidBrowser works the same way as it does for saving YouTube Gaming replays: a replay (VOD) can usually be grabbed by clicking the entry with the orange download button in the video library panel on the right, choosing a resolution first and saving it as MP4; a live stream still in progress has no ready-made file, so it has to be recorded — moving the cursor over the picture brings up the recording controls, where you can pick 1x real time, or 2x and 4x to finish faster, hit Record All for the whole thing, and start or pause at any point from the button on the left.

If you are thinking about moving to another streaming platform, the "revenue split, moderation, content ecosystem" framework in a Kick vs Twitch comparison works just as well for judging whether the next one is worth your time.

FAQ

Is Trovo still usable?

Not for live streaming. The live service closed on 30 June 2026 and will not return; the website and account system are still there, though, with accounts, levels and friend lists all kept, and the platform has moved in a casual-games direction, so any Elixir left in your account can still be spent inside its games.

Can Trovo recordings still be recovered?

Realistically, the platform's own copies are gone. The company stated that live-related data (VODs, chat logs) would be deleted permanently after the statutory retention period and told users to download it before the shutdown. If you did not save it then, the only hope is a local file someone else downloaded in advance.

How do I stop streamed content I like from disappearing along with a platform?

Stop expecting a platform to hold things for you long term — save what is worth keeping on the spot. Replay content should be downloaded to disk while it is still within its window, and live streams can only be preserved by recording. Files on your own drive do not stop working because a platform changed its rules or shut down, and that is the most practical safety net there is.