As a new streamer trying to find an audience*, one way that occurs to me to do so is by piggybacking off of popular variety streamers who happen to play a game I like. Viewers think the game is cool and want to watch more of it, but now the variety streamer in question has moved on to something else. I'd like to identify events like this for certain games or categories and be notified of them.

For example, I really like a game called "Drova: Forsaken Kin." It's not very well-known and as a consequence doesn't have much viewership. However, let's imagine that some popular variety streamer decides to play it for a day (Without Loss of Generality, we'll imagine this streamer is Asmongold) As a result of this, many viewers think the game looks cool and follow the Drova category hoping to see more of it in future. However, Asmongold quickly gets bored of it and the next day he's back to reacting to stuff on Twitter or whatever he does all day (IDK, I've only watched him like twice). In theory, if I were to subsequently stream Drova, some of the viewers responsible for the spike in category follows would check out my stream.

Manually following a large amount of categories for unpopular games I play could be difficult, especially since it's not possible to separate my followed categories into subsets of "games I play and would stream" vs "games I just watch" or whatever.

I could try to implement a scraper and scrape a specified set of categories periodically, but Twitch might disapprove of this and also it would be a large amount of work.

I looked at the API, but there doesn't appear to be a way to retrieve this information via the public, documented API which is intended for consumption by developers. If we look at

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/ea-sports-fc-26

the relevant information is the line near the top which (currently) says "75.3K Viewers, 315K Followers" (which I would be looking for changes to). However, this information does not come from the Developer API but from the GraphQL api. To wit, a query to Directory_DirectoryBanner returns

[
    {
        "data": {
            "game": {
                "id": "624536948",
                "slug": "ea-sports-fc-26",
                "name": "EA Sports FC 26",
                "displayName": "EA Sports FC 26",
                "coverURL": null,
                "avatarURL": "https://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/ttv-boxart/624536948_IGDB-144x192.jpg",
                "description": "The Club is Yours in EA SPORTS FC 26. Play your way with an overhauled gameplay experience powered by community feedback, Manager Live Challenges that bring fresh storylines to the new season, and Archetypes inspired by greats of the game.",
                "viewersCount": 75322,
                "followersCount": 314652,
                "igdbURL": "https://www.igdb.com/games/ea-sports-fc-26",
                "prestoID": "amzn1.adg.product.6838e5c2-c8e4-4c8b-b8fa-db9e2f6e478a",
...

However, since the GraphQL API isn't documented for developers, I don't think I'm supposed to be using it. And I don't know how much work it would be to fetch the information (e.g. the query has some kind of HMAC and I don't know how it works or if a standard library supplies it).

So it doesn't seem straightforward to implement this via an extension. So it would have to be implemented by Twitch, unless I'm missing something.

*I'm not really actively trying to grow a stream. However, when I considered doing so earlier, one of the things which discouraged me was not knowing how to go about finding an audience, so it's kind of accurate. Also, I'm just trying to write this in user-story format, and I'm probably not the only person with this concern, so whatever.