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.

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.

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

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