I am doing extensions as a hobby and can relate to a number of things raised here.
Full disclosure I was selected to participate in the beta.
@BigMistake I believe they will still consider you just the same, they want the competition as it benefits twitch and streamers. I can relate to the feeling of seeing one of the big companies have the same idea. I want to work on niche idea’s as I know I can’t compete against the big guns, but its hard to know what they are working on in secret, plus if they see the success of small devs they would be foolish to not try and take the market. It’s the same as any market place i guess. I have people asking me to make poll/voting extensions but with it being serviced so well you have to choose your battles. I’d argue making a business out of it would be like any start up, with the risk of failure being very high which is why I wont be quitting my day job any time soon.
On the discussion of the cut, i can see why its fixed for now. If they were to remove the 20/80, larger companies would give them full proceeds and recoup costs elsewhere so no one would be using a competitor, at least at this stage. I’d agree white listing broadcasters to receive full bits would have a lot of merit, especially when developing for a specific broadcaster. I can see Twitch wanting to reclaim the money currently floating around in donations and they are pretty specific that the only kind of money that can be used via extensions are bits. It wouldn’t surprise me if they state that you can only make money from the income through twitch (say if they add ‘monthly cost’ to installing it for broadcasters) to make sure that people aren’t going off site to do the transactions.