For what it’s worth, I’ll be taking down my two live component extensions once these changes go through in July. I agree that component extensions need some changes to make them more user friendly and uniform across the platform, however I think what’s proposed here is the wrong direction.
In my opinion, one of the best use cases for components is alerts/alert style feedback, where viewers can trigger something that is displayed to all viewers of the stream. I made simple, single purpose, monetized extensions that do exactly that. Now there’s basically no incentive to use them because the vast majority of viewers will not display the extension (ignoring the fact that the style doesn’t work anymore because I can’t have a blank area that only displays something when an alert fires). Also, the primary method of discovery for viewers to interact with the extension was through them seeing other viewers trigger it, as well as a small call to action from my ‘minimized’ states. Neither of those will be effective any longer.
The only way I can get similar functionality to what’s live now will be to convert the ‘alert’ display part of the extension to an offsite browser source that the streamer will have to add to their scenes in OBS. And then reduce the extension to a dialog for triggering outputs/alerts. In my opinion that’s:
a) a non-trivial amount of work
b) even less clear to viewers what is/isn’t an extension
c) a higher barrier to entry for streamers to install and
d) unlikely to increase the fairly mediocre traction/earnings that the extensions currently see (not Twitch’s problem to be fair)
For those reasons, I’ll be taking the extensions down since they don’t seem worth it from either an economic perspective, or a labor-of-love perspective given the constant changes to the platform that are often announced with little/no notice and require significant rework of the extensions each time.
If it were up for discussion, my ideal change-list would be:
- Add the new icon block as a central point for viewers to interact with component/overlay extensions
- Keep component extensions visible by default
- Put a little eye icon next to each extension icon to completely show/hide extensions (like the visible toggle does now)
- Give us a callback from users hovering/clicking the icon that we can use to trigger our active/minimized states (make it toggle an opaque background for the extension area if you must)
- Give us a function to trigger a notification bubble from our icon in the block so we can tell the viewer when something interactive is happening
But by the look of things it’s not up for discussion any longer. So be it.