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

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.

Twitch should be allowed to be a place not just for entertainment, but also for learning and education. People who wants to stream educational content are currently not allowed to participate on Twitch, unless they are artists or programmers. Twitch is one of the largest streaming services, and while there is plenty of educational material on the internet, there is a lack of interactive, free to use services for interactive classes. Twitch could become a fantastic plattform for students, teachers and groups who wants to learn in a more interactive environment, that they can't get with other learning resources on the internet.

Ranging from writing and discussing novels, to poetry, scripts, comics, article editing, tabletop campaign planning, world creation, etc. There are a wide array of people doing various forms of creative writing on twitch, (Counted 53 channels so far, still working on finding more) and often it's hard to decide between "Creative" "Art" or "Just Chatting". Currently all we have to search for similar content is the "Writing" tag, which some of the broader definitions are hesitant to use, and is also used by people writing computer code, which is honestly a very different type of content despite it's visual similarities.

A category for this would seriously help us to find content and be found by the wider community of storytelling or wordsmithing fans that use twitch, as well as make it easier for twitches algorithm to identify what we watch. (I am often recommended visual art streams because I watch a lot of writers that use the art category, but never recommended any writing channels, and others I have spoken to experience the same)

Hi,
My name is Ludovic Iochem, I am in the senior management team of a Visual effects company called DNEG, multi Oscars winner Company.
I am on twitch under the name : Keepcalmiminvfx
I have been streaming for a couple of month and are slowly but surely building my community around a Discord Server counting more than 2800 after 3 months (the biggest VFX Discord available).

I am a friend of a few Twitch Streamer, also streaming Visual Effects related contents, review sessions and techniques demonstration like Hugo's Desk, AndrewHogdson3D, STFvfx, etc...
More and more people from the Industry are coming on twitch to follow our Streams.
We are all moving towards the Partnership but we can feel a reason why more people are not joining.

I would like to ask you if we could create a Visual Effects Category, which would allow us to really promote CGI, 3D and 2D techniques used for Films, commercial and animation.

My senior position allows me to bring High end Visual Effects Supervisor to stream some Live Comments sessions night, etc. But we would need a better representation with the possibility to have a dedicated section, ether "Visual Effects" or "VFX and Animation".

Please let me know what you think about it.
I am happy to discuss more.

Regards
Ludo

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.

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!

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

Add custom level category for an increasing community of players that are streaming custom made games or levels such as TRLE levels (tomb raider level editor/ trle.net). Could also apply to other games with custom maps/mods etc.

There is a steadily increasing audience for these levels and it is detrimental to the streamer to have to set the game as "tomb raider the last revelation" most of the time, purely because this is the engine used, but not actually what is being streamed. People will open the stream for tomb raider 4 but leave when its not actually tomb raider 4.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. :)

It would be great if there could be a pop-up appear for viewers when opening a stream that shows them the details of any content warnings for the stream's selected game category.

There are an increasing number of games that contain content and/or trigger warnings for players at the start of the game, which is great. However, they are generally only displayed at the beginning of the game and not shown again after. If a viewer is exploring Twitch and opens a stream after the initial content warning has been displayed in the game they don't get to see it. Having a game content warning pop-up when opening a stream, similar to the mature content warning we get if a channel has been flagged as mature content, would help to create a safer and more accessible browsing experience for viewers.

Allowing game devs/publishers to select in the Twitch Developer Console if their game has a content warning and the giving them the ability to add their own warning text to a pop-up for viewers would likely be the best way to add this feature. Perhaps there could also be a way for viewers to flag if they feel a game requires a content warning pop-up.