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Create a Game Development Category.

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
4,731 votes

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PirateSoftware shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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  • Trent_Sterling commented  ·   ·  Report

    Twitch used to have a proper GameDev category. IDK why they merged it with a bunch of unrelated **** but they need to fix it already!
  • poilapan commented  ·   ·  Report

    I wholeheartedly agree with this, and this is the best way to let people with similar interests and skills join in without mudding the waters on the live-streaming platform.
  • Mojko commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hate having game development streams bundled togheter with irrelevant things I'm not interested in
  • DucktalkGames commented  ·   ·  Report

    My university project is building a company and my team is focusing on making a game dev company that live-streams everything we do, we would love for there to be a game-dev category! Both inside and outside of our work hours we think it would help us greatly and makes a lot of sense with the recent rise in collaboration between gaming and streaming!
  • GeorgeBroussard commented  ·   ·  Report

    Twitch 100% needs a #gamedev category and the service took a step backward when it went away. Also a dedicated #programming category. Shoving everyone into Science & Technology isn't good. Category fragmentation is a thing, but at the same time you have little hope of growing a community when there isn't even a dedicated place to go that's more focused on what you do.
  • HippoTheLegend commented  ·   ·  Report

    Game development is a very interesting category and it having its own category would bring more attention to it. Would love to see Twitch address this especially since there seems to be a lot of people who want this.
  • Dramakins commented  ·   ·  Report

    Twitch, how has there been zero update on this? The directory should have never been taken away. Please bring it back.
  • gary_beebe commented  ·   ·  Report

    I just noticed that there's a BASIC programming category... But no GameDev?
  • katana_steel commented  ·   ·  Report

    We shouldn't have to ask. This shouldn't ever had been dropped.
    For me, coming to twitch, I'm here to learn from Game Devs.
    And I want to start streaming my own Dev progress, from art work, audio mixing,
    and not least of which, coding.

    It would be a perfect to Category to be discovered.
  • stewSquared commented  ·   ·  Report

    I'm for this, but it would hide programmers that weren't doing game development, which seems to be at least half of the live coding streams. I'd like to see a more general category of programming instead.
  • ajaco_b commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi, I would like to stream Game development and feal that there is no suited category for it.

    the category "Science & Technology" feels a little to global and there is no "Development" or "Coding"
  • SingleArity commented  ·   ·  Report

    Please Twitch hurry up and get this done! <3
  • ElectriKitty commented  ·   ·  Report

    We NEEEED this!! I know so many game devs who would LOVE this.
  • AlchyApples commented  ·   ·  Report

    It's so hard to find game developers on Twitch right now, this is absolutely necessary.
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