Twitch for Game Developers

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How to integrate Twitch into any part of the game development lifecycle

In 2017, an average of 21 games were released per day on Steam and last year, the global games industry gross revenue was approximately $138 billion. It’s a crowded market. And as a game developer, you’re not only competing with an increasing amount of other games, but also other screens, social media, other forms of entertainment — and real life.

Differentiation is now more important than ever.

- Werbung -

Games are Better with Twitch

Every day on average, more than 15 million visitors tune into Twitch, three million streamers go live per month, and last year, audiences enjoyed about 505 billion minutes of content.

Watching others play video games on Twitch has massively grown. For instance, in February 2019, EA released Apex Legends on Twitch without prior announcement or much traditional marketing. The game saw more than 2.5 million players within 24 hours after release, and had 25 million players by the end of its first week. The game also generated more hours watched than any other game on Twitch in its launch week.

Twitch fosters gaming communities through conversation, interaction, and giving audiences a way to directly support their favorite content creators. In 2017, they sent 16 billion chat messages and interacted with Twitch Extensions 4.9 billion times.

Twitch is changing the way games are marketed by being a truly direct interactive conduit. Game developers now have access to direct and consistent relationships with their fans through Twitch creators, who are the ambassadors of their communities.

Twitch creates a watch/play loop with viewers

By integrating with Twitch, game developers can:

Acquire new users by creating influencer campaigns, cross-promotional incentives, utilizing Twitch Prime, doing game launches for pre-orders, and more.
Create new engaging experiences for Twitch viewers and streamers by extending the gameplay and turning viewers into active participants in the game.
Retain users by creating a watch/play loop by driving players to watch your game on Twitch and incentivize viewers to go back to the game.
Help your influencers and brand monetize by selling merchandise, in-game-items, and other benefits on Twitch.

Game producers, developers, and marketing leads at game companies may know Twitch is big, that Twitch viewers watch a lot of gaming content, and that Twitch is influential in promoting games. But you might not know the best practices for integrating Twitch into games, for launching games on Twitch, or for tapping into Twitch to grow and sustain live titles.

This game developer playbook is designed to give producers, developers, and marketing leads actionable next steps to integrate Twitch into different stages of a game’s lifecycle including:

A strategy for growing hours watched and revenue on Twitch.
Ways to increase pre-orders of games.
A strategy to re-engage lapsed players and re-engage players for live services.
Ways to turn viewers on Twitch into players.

Game Phases & High-level Recommendations

Most games are built in a stage-gated process with up to eight gates, which are distilled here into three major phases:

Phase 1 — Development. This phase encompasses everything from pre-production through first production, production, and alpha. Games that are in development are usually unannounced. We recommend that games in development integrate core, foundational Twitch features to help drive and engage new users.

Phase 2 — The Road to Launch & Launch. The road to launch includes announcement and beta. Launch includes the launch event itself and the first month after launch. In the road to launch and launch, games concentrate on building a great product, generating awareness of their game, and on acquiring users. We recommend that during this phase, games work with Twitch to promote their game to acquire new users.

Phase 3 — Live Games. Twitch’s largest and most watched games are live games; nine out of 10 top titles on Twitch in 2018 were released before 2018. Twitch has a set of programs to help publishers acquire new users, re-engage lapsed users, and retain them in game.

Let’s dive into each phase.

The best time to integrate core Twitch features is when games are in active development.

At this stage, you care about:

Driving play. Build hooks to drive users to play your game after launch.
Making your game fun to watch. Keep users engaged in your game when they’re not actively playing by creating entertaining viewing experiences.
Ensuring simple implementation. Twitch makes the tools and services you need to easily integrate Twitch into your game.
Tracking measurable impact. Ensure you can track the impact of Twitch programs on core KPIs in future phases.

Use these programs to achieve your goals:

Identity

Identity is foundational for most Twitch integrations. It enables your application to take actions on behalf of a Twitch account or access certain data about a user’s account. We recommend bidirectionally integrating Twitch identity between Twitch and game publisher accounts so that you can get information, such as in-game items, from Twitch as well as post to Twitch about a user and/or game state, such as a streamer’s or viewer’s stats. Twitch supports OAuth 2.0 and OIDC (OpenID Connect).

Beta Campaign with Bounty Board

Recruiting streamers to promote your beta using Bounty Board drives deep engagement with influencer campaigns through dozens or hundreds of small to mid-sized communities and a streamlined self-service activation that delivers brand-safe content with unparalleled engagement from viewers. You can easily distribute betas to streamers and drive a high degree of interest during the campaign. You can also utilize Extensions to drive pre-orders of your game and offer exclusive perks for Twitch users in betas by having bonuses translate into rewards in game.

Twitch mobilized Bounty Board’s community of influencers to generate excitement during the beta of Darwin Project. The launch helped them reach an engaged audience of gamers who experienced the game together and provided valuable feedback. 113 influencers activated the Bounty, resulting in 51,000 total views and 60 percent of viewers stayed on the channel for two or more minutes. We strongly recommend Bounty Board for indie games.

Interactive Extensions

Twitch viewers love to interact with streamers and with other members of the community, particularly when they can help streamers. By creating ways for viewers and streamers to interact and starting this process when your game is in development, you can help to grow your game’s audience at launch and know how to re-engage them later on.

The Darwin Project built an Extension that helped streamers play in Show Director mode and have viewers affect the game by helping or hindering the streamer. It’s a prime example of how an interactive Extension can include the viewers, which makes it more fun to watch and can help grow a strong community for your game on Twitch.

Drops

Drops allows game developers to offer special offers, content, or in-game items to Twitch viewers who watch your games. Drops convert viewers into players, because viewers get in-game items that are only worth anything if they play the game; they need to play to derive benefit from it. Dozens of game developers have used Drops to improve player retention and spend.

Mods

Twitch enables you to promote discovery of your game’s mods through the Twitch desktop app — where you can also manage them — and to drive additional discovery with a mod manager Extension on Twitch; the Extension allows a streamer to show off what mods they are playing to their community and then enables people to download and play the mod with their favorite streamer. Twitch also supports mod developers through a rewards program. Other developers are building free content for your game, which helps with organic retention and acquisition.

Blessing and Curses is a mod for Stardew Valley that adds a random chance to gain a random buff or debuff every x amount of days. If a streamer connects their Twitch account and channel name, Chat can choose from three randomly shown buff or debuff options. By using Twitch as a focus, the mod gives viewers a way to interact and affect game play on a whole new level.

Development Phase Pro tips!

Streamer Mode. We recommend enabling streamers to self-identify in game through a setting and allowing them to hide sensitive UI elements. For example, prominent streamers can get hundreds of friend requests and invites per hour, and enabling a Streamer Mode can make it easier for them to play.

Streamer User Testing. We recommend user testing your game with streamers on Twitch regularly throughout development.

Things to think about

When you’re in the Development stage of your game, think about:

Implementing Twitch Identity to integrate your game with Twitch.
Harnessing Bounty Board for beta campaigns, doing Drops campaigns, and embracing mods to make your game more fun to watch, which can help turn viewers into players.

Engaging with streamers when your game is in active development and building a campaign with on-Twitch beats from announcement through launch will help you maximize promotion efforts and ultimately, drive more interest in your game.