Creative and IRL used to be categories on Twitch. Everything that wasn't games was in Creative. This means everything from Bob Ross to ASMR (let's be real that's the same thing.) was all in one place and entirely unsearchable.|

Twitch broke up Creative and IRL into a bunch of new and rad categories to help discoverability. This included Music, Art, Beauty, Food, Just Chatting, Tabletops, ASMR, Science & Technology, and others. This category splitting really helped a lot of smaller communities grow. It was easier to find new and interesting streamers because you could now discover them in an otherwise bloated and unsearchable wasteland.

For a brief period of time Game Development was also a category right after Creative was brought down. We had a huge amount of new viewers in that category but Twitch removed it after only two weeks. We were averaging 7.1 new followers per hour under Game Development.

Science & Technology however did not gain any benefit from this. It's become another catch all like Creative was. Weed growing, animal cams, earthquake sims, and a few programmers mixed in. We average 2.8 new followers per hour in this category because nobody knows what it is.

If you search Game Development on Twitch right now the category doesn't show up, neither do streams with the tag of Game Development, in fact... nothing shows up. If you search for Science "AND" Technology you get nothing. You actually have to search for Science "&" Technology. This compounds the discoverability issue and makes the category even worse for developers. We need Game Development back.

It's a simple change but it can help build a lot of new communities on Twitch. It can also make more money for indie devs and Twitch at the same time. At the end of the day I feel incredibly lucky with the success we've had on Twitch. Because of this platform and our community we will never need a publisher or investors. We get to own 100% of our studio.

I want that replicated for game devs that come after us.

This thread was posted publicly on Twitter and has so far received a very large amount of community support.
https://twitter.com/PirateSoftware/status/1361911034219425792

The rise of the VR industry and the relatively new phenomenon of Virtual Streamers and Virtual Youtubers has made impact on sites like Twitch as well. There is a very large (800+ and growing) community of streamers on twitch who use a virtual avatar combined with face tracking software to use instead of webcams. VR is already a tag, but it would be nice to distinguish this category for those who use avatars and may play the role of a character. (like HoloLive, for example) It's not much different than having Anime as a tag, for example.

Thank you very much for your time! Please consider voting this up!

As a Galician streamer I love to watch other galician streamers. But twitch plataform don't allow me to set that my videos are in Galego because I can't specify that I'm streaming in Galego. I must choose: "Others".

This situation creates a problem for at least 3.000.000- 4 million people that speak galician because we have no easy method to find videos/streams in our language.

For that reason, We will really appreciate that twitch adds Galician (Galego) language as an option on Language settings of Live Streams.

NOTE: that we are not asking to translate the whole platform. We only want an easy way for galicians and any other existant language to filter the content and classifty it.

Catalan, which had a similar problem, was included recently

Thanks in advance for your support.

The browsing itself is great, I like that we can browse separate subcategories (for example in Gaming) like Shooter, Action & Adventure, Role Playing etc but it would be great if the shown streams weren't all the highest viewer counts. Yeah it increases the discoverability but only if you're in the top 5-10.

Maybe there is a way to display random streams from that category/subcategory? A mix of different channels would be great so streamers with lower view counts don't disappear. Especially because expanding the subcategory only gives you a few more streams, not all of them. Normally we can sort by highest to lowest, lowest to highest or recently started; would be great to see something similar. Letting us filter by tags would be great, too.

"Flow Arts": As the current world condition has taken us from previous live festivals and performance, many Flow Artists and Dancers are turning to virtual and broadcasted live performances of their talents. Traditionally, we as dancers, hula-hoop performers, jugglers, poi spinners and other similar disciplines, have had to gravitate towards the "Music & Performance Art" category. (With no specific tag identifying us as with Flow Artists, nor dancers). Now that Twitch has adjusted back to "Music" as the original category, we have migrated to "just chatting"; it doesn't really identify our community at all, among others that actually do feature a "just chatting" brand. With the help of a few partnered streamers, we have formed a Twitch Team - "Flowmies" that was approved earlier in Spring of this year. We've since been building and growing our community while inviting and supporting other flow artists IRL, to come join Twitch from other platforms to continue their performance routines that have otherwise been put on pause. Some of the entertainers that have become part of our Team Flowmies have an incredible following outside of Twitch; with years to decades of experience in their field. Marketing, branding, and merchandising has led them to become quite successful, and we're honored that they have joined Twitch, and our team through our interview process. However, we still lack that unique category or tag that represents what a viewer can expect from our content. More importantly, we find difficulty in discovering fellow flow artists that may be interested in a larger community with growth potential, since we cannot search for "Flow Arts" as a tag. Not even "Dance" exists (which would be a vague description of what we perform).

We would like Twitch to introduce a tag "Flow Arts" to help identify our content and reach others that may search for similar creators so that we may bring more community building exercises and foster a home for a wide spectrum of talents that we already align ourselves with on our entertainment résumés as flow artists.

Thank you,
Scottie_Fox

In the days of communities, BrickinNick and I pushed for Twitch to create a community for BrickBuilding. After some back and forth emails, we convinced Twitch that LEGO is a creative medium/form of expression and deserves to be recognized in the Creative category. Hooray!

Currently, tags have replaced communities. Tags created some discoverability but they are misused and often used by streamers playing unrelated games. A dedicated LEGO or BrickBuilding category would help users find more streamers building with LEGO bricks and similar construction kits.

LEGO is too broad of a hobby to lock into the makers and crafting category. From sets to people building their own creations, visiting conventions, designing their own parts, reviewing sets, and more!

If the title "BrickBuilding" is chosen as a more suitable name for the category, as it is already known for LEGO building on Twitch, we hope it would still be discovered when searching the term "LEGO" as well!

Thanks and happy building!

For years, the "I Wanna Be The Guy" category on Twitch has been the main hub for the original game along with its 10k+ fangames. There have been increasingly more categories added to Twitch for various fangames, and it only stands to divide the category for an already relatively small community.

I would like to request that the "I Wanna Be the Guy" category is renamed to "I Wanna Be The Guy + Fangames" and that the following games be removed from Twitch (and the followers migrated to the new category if possible):

I Wanna Be The Boshy
I Wanna Kill The Kamilia 3
I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden
I Wanna Be the Co-op
I Wanna be The Justice Guy
I Wanna Run the Marathon
I Wanna Kill The Guy
I Wanna Take the Time Machine

I have already gotten direct permission from Kayin, the maker of "I Wanna Be The Guy," for any changes to be made for the betterment of the community.

As an Asturian user I love to watch asturian streamers. But Twitch plataform don't allow me to set that my videos are in Asturian because I can't specify that I'm streaming in Asturian I must choose: "Others".

This situation creates a problem for at least 600,000 people that speak Asturian because we have no easy method to find videos/streams in our language.

For that reason, We will really appreciate that twitch adds Asturian (Asturianu) language as an option on Language settings of Live Streams.

NOTE: that we are not asking to translate the whole platform. We only want an easy way for asturians and any other existant language to filter the content and classifty it.

Thanks in advance for your support.

A recent change to the IGDB classified Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate for the Switch as a 'version' of Monster Hunter Generations for the 3DS - removing the Generations Ultimate directory entirely from Twitch.
This is a problem for quite a few streamers and viewers alike as the games provide entirely different and expanded experiences from one another, and viewers might search out someone playing the 3DS base game as opposed to the expanded iteration for the Switch that came later on.

Most people playing either of these entries today are streaming "Generations Ultimate" for the Switch. It's a game that built on the original version of the game that released on the 3DS, and it has substantial changes like a variety of new bosses, a new story campaign, a further difficulty rank that nearly doubles the game's length, and expanded weapon controls that allow the weapons to play completely differently than in the base "Monster Hunter Generations" for the 3DS.

People who are going back to the 3DS version these days are looking to experience the base-game without Generations Ultimate's inclusions. Again, this is a very different experience than how the 'expanded' Generations Ultimate is to play through with all its additions.

As it stands, with the Generations Ultimate category being removed most streamers have to mis-categorize their Generations Ultimate streams from the Switch as "Generations" for the 3DS. All their VODs which have used the "Generations Ultimate" category can no longer be found by viewers searching for that game to watch, and folks who follow the more popular "Generations Ultimate" category may not easily know to follow the "Generations" for 3DS category in order to keep finding the streams they want to watch.

I've talked with the IGDB folks in their Discord, and this unfortunately isn't a database issue. Generations Ultimate definitely is an iterated-on expansion of the base-game Generations, but it's not a different version of the same game.

These two games are very different, and only offering the less-used basegame "Generations" category as a way for streamers to present their broadcasts and for viewers to find the entertainment they want isn't a good solution.

Cheers & thanks for reading. ~M