Improving the Flexibility of Twitch Drops

Announcements
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Twitch Drops is a self-service product that provides game developers and publishers the ability to grant in-game rewards to the Twitch community for watching streamers playing their game. It brings the community closer to the game, ultimately helping to acquire new players and re-engage an existing player base. As we plan the next chapter, Twitch Drops will continue to be a compelling and accessible benefit for both viewers and streamers.

Before we get into the details, there are a few important dates to know. We will launch a new beta version of Drops on September 13, 2023. If you are a game developer or publisher who was considering a Drops campaign with a start date after October 18 and/or an end date after November 15, you must wait until the beta launch to create that campaign. For example, a developer cannot yet create a campaign in advance that would run from October 30 to November 20 as the start and end date is beyond the time that the current version of Drops will be supported.

Making way for improvements

As we continue our investment in Twitch Drops for game developers, streamers, and viewers, we are embarking on an infrastructure migration that will improve our ability to mitigate issues, increase reliability, and provide flexibility to offer new features.

The information below describes in detail what developers can expect as we shift to the new infrastructure. We will cover which features will remain the same, which features will experience changes, and a timeline for the migration.

What’s not changing

Developers can expect that the overall Twitch Drops campaign experience will not change during our infrastructure migration.

Developer APIs - The Twitch Helix API endpoints available for Drops remain unchanged. This means that developers do not need to update any of their current code for Drops entitlement.

Twitch developer console - Drops will continue to be a self-service product through the developer console on dev.twitch.tv. There will be minor feature changes as noted below.

Category selection - Developers can select which Twitch category their campaign should target from their list of games in the developer console as is the case today.

Independent Drops - Multiple Drops can be created with their own independent time-based rules for earning as is possible today.

Streamer Experience - The streamer experience largely remains unchanged. The Viewer Rewards section of the creator dashboard will remain as is.

Viewer Experience - When a developer begins using the new version of Drops, viewers will not have to reauthenticate, or relink their accounts, for the new campaigns. OAuth connections as well as Drops progress and history will be preserved.

What is changing

While many Drops campaign features are not changing, there are some that will either be retired due to developer feedback or low usage, or may be implemented after the infrastructure migration is complete.

Streamer account linking - Streamers will no longer need to link their Twitch account with a game developer for a Drops campaign to be available on their channel. This should eliminate a common frustration we hear from streamers who wanted to participate in a campaign, but were not aware of the account linking requirement. Streamers can expect to see this change in association with campaigns created in the new version of Drops as they begin on or after October 18. An option to opt out of Drops campaigns will continue to be available if streamers choose to do so. Please note that there is no change to account linking for viewers to earn Drops.

Progress/Claim dependency - The ability to include a dependency that a single reward is claimed or its viewing rule is completed before progress begins on the next Drop will not be available following the migration. This change will improve the viewer experience as it was not apparent to all viewers when a claim dependency was enabled and an action was required on their behalf to continue earning subsequent rewards.

Removing analytics tab - The “Analytics” tab on a Drops campaign will be removed due to low usage and need. Game analytics will continue to be available under the “Games” tab within the developer console.

Overlapping campaigns - Campaigns with overlapping start and end dates cannot exist for the same Twitch category. Allowing this scenario previously had caused confusion for viewers as it was unclear in what order rewards were earned. Developers should make sure all rewards are included in a single campaign, however it will not be possible to simultaneously provide a global set of rewards for all streamers and a secondary set of rewards only available on specific streamer channels.

Repeatable claims - The ability to set a reward’s “Drop Claim Limit” to more than one will not be available following the migration. An alternative approach is the creation of multiple, sequential campaigns, one for each time the reward can be claimed.

Timeline

Date Description
2023‑08‑09 - Announcing our future plans for Twitch Drops (this announcement).
- New campaigns on the current version of Drops cannot have a start date after October 18, 2023 or an end date after November 15, 2023. These dates are critical for a transitional period between versions.
2023‑09‑13 - The beta version of Drops becomes available to all developers and publishers via the “Drops (BETA)” tab in the developer console.
- Developers can now use the “Drops (BETA)” section to create campaigns with start dates after October 18 and end dates after November 15.
- Existing campaigns using the older version of Drops (i.e. start dates before October 18 and end dates before November 15) will continue to operate as expected.
- Developers continue to have access to current and past campaigns.
2023‑10‑18 - The “Drops” tab in the developer console for the previous version will be retitled to “Drops (legacy).”
- The “Drops (BETA)” tab in the developer console will be retitled to “Drops.”
- Drops documentation will be updated at https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/drops.
- Game developers and publishers will continue to have access to past campaigns.
2023‑11‑15 - With no active Drops campaigns remaining in the previous version of Drops, the ability to create campaigns in the older version will be removed.
- The “Drops (legacy)” tab will remain to view historical campaigns and data.
2023‑12‑01 - The “Drops (legacy)” tab will be removed, thus historical campaigns (i.e. campaigns with start dates before October 18, 2023) will no longer be available in the developer console. Streamers and viewers will continue to see their historical campaigns and rewards within their respective creator dashboard and inventory experiences.

What action is needed now?

As of today, the primary action is to carefully review the changes and the timeline above in case it may impact your future plans for creating Drops campaigns toward the end of the year. If you have any questions regarding this infrastructure migration as we build the foundation for the future of Drops, please feel free to include them below, reach out to your Business Development representative, or send an email to developers@twitch.tv.

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The overlapping campaign and the ability to not run multiple whitelists is the most significant blow for us. Is there a roadmap for future improvements?

This feels like a huge step back for developers, streamers, viewers and even Twitch.

2 Likes
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Similar concerns as with the previous reply. The change to overlapping campaigns is severely impacting ongoing plans and strategies we were working on, and seems like something that could be addressed with clearer communication instead of cutting features.

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Overlapping campaigns did not appear to be one of the more important features following a survey we conducted with select game developers who use Drops, however it’s becoming clearer that providing different sets of rewards is the main use case and has a great impact on developers who are using overlapping campaigns in this way. So thank you for these comments.

The main concern with overlapping campaigns today is the viewer experience as mentioned above. To solve the viewer concerns as well as your developer concerns, one approach for us to consider is a new feature specifically for creating separate reward sets under a single campaign once the new infrastructure is in place. Of course, it is not clear at this time if this would be the exact solution that would be built and we cannot commit to this feature today, but it is something that we will look into further.

@Alistair There is no public roadmap for features to share at this time as future work is actively being prioritized and feedback like this is helpful in that process.

@Coshy90 While this announcement and the comments are intended to provide clear communication regarding the upcoming changes in a timely fashion, we’re certainly open to thoughts on how to provide clearer communication.

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Respectfully many developers do not put much effort into drops and never push drops to their potential. I can’t comment on your survey and who was involved, but I do recall filling it out and talking to the team on a call - this was greatly appreciated.

Talking to many other developers who have run the top Twitch drop campaigns, most utilise one or more of the dropped features and are unhappy with these changes. These are essential features for everyone, causing developers to consider not committing to drops later this year and sceptical of next year.

We have used our creator drop campaigns which use overlapping drop campaigns to highlight multiple lesser popular streamers and have aided them to grow on Twitch, this will be one of our biggest losses.

Removing the flexibility of drops hampers our efforts which ultimately benefited everyone involved. It has accelerated creator’s growth and increased viewership. One example, drops have aided one of the most popular, if not the most popular, TwitchRivals channel streams this year. Without drops, It’s debatable whether Twitch would have had comparable viewership than without drops running multiple campaigns.

The main concern with overlapping campaigns today is the viewer experience

We rarely got this feedback, but it’s undoubtedly a problem we saw and tried to address on our end to inform users. We did provide UX feedback and improvement ideas for several years on how to improve this. To this day, some UI which worked 3~ years ago, no longer works, which led to some confusion. Recently the URL we used to direct users to drop-enabled channels broke completely, which led to mass viewership confusion, we flagged this with Twitch.

The core problem/fear is this is being released too early, with cut features and no hard commitment on when and what improvements will come. Will it be released and the team reassigned? I recall talking to Twitch when drops were first released, most of the improvements mentioned during the early days never came to fruition.

I appreciate you listening and replying.

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Thanks for getting back to the comments here and giving some heads-up for this change, I shared already our feedback with our BD representative but I wanted to highlight some points here:

Visibility with different campaigns isn’t a major feedback point for us but our audience is also very used to this concept. Instead of removing the feature it would be better to create a differentiation between channel-focused drops and game-category drops. This is also a general problem in terms of visibility in the Drops campaigns to understand for users which channels are actually eligible for drops. Ultimately this restriction will lead to content creators losing out on campaigns - either general content creator population because there is a channel-whitelist drop or the potential whitelist-content creators because the drop will be game category wide. It also means that publishers lose the ability to run e.g. company-channel focused drops alongside other drops - plus we can’t really pause campaigns to continue later on and thus would have to re-issue previous rewards and cancel previous progress.

I see this as reducing flexibility and diversity of drops for a small potential impact without further changes in how these different drop campaigns can be visually differentiated for users and how easy it is for viewers to navigate drops.

Analytics – while I shared my concerns about the current state of analytics before, I think removing this feature altogether is a step in the wrong direction instead of providing simple but easy access to Drop statistics and providing platform visibility on performance of drop campaigns.

Removal of account linking requirement, progress/claim dependency or repeatable claims are no issue.

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Hi @jbulava! From a streamers perspective this will hurt us significantly.

By preventing concurrent campaigns with no overlapping you will prevent developers from having specific campaigns on their own channels as well as general category wide campaigns. The changes effectively force developers to choose: prioritising either their own channel and events or streamers in the category. Obviously developers will choose their own channels.

I implore you to reconsider overlapping campaigns as this reduces flexibility and will severely negatively impact your creators.

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Hi @Quickybaby, thanks for the additional streamer perspective. The team is evaluating how to potentially offer different reward sets without the need for overlapping campaigns. That way we can remove the issues inherent to overlapping campaign while retaining a common use case that is beneficial to developers and streamers. For example, this could take the form of an update to the developer console allowing developers to define multiple sets within a single campaign, define which channels apply to each set, and automatically check for conflicts. As this is in active discussion, we cannot provide a definitive design or timeline, but I wanted to confirm the feedback is heard.

@Crysantos Thanks for your detailed notes as well. Analytics is another area the team is actively discussing and we’ll make sure to provide updates should this be included in some form during or after the migration.

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As a new developer diving into the world of Twitch drops, I’ve been thrilled by the possibilities this feature offers for both streamers and viewers. One strategy that we wanted to implement, was to split our drops into two overlapping distinct campaigns within the same category:

Open Campaign for All Streamers (Lower Quality Rewards): This campaign would be accessible to all streamers within the selected category, allowing viewers to earn rewards while exploring a variety of channels.

Exclusive Campaign with Handpicked Streamers (Higher Quality Rewards): In this campaign, we’d collaborate with a select group of streamers known for their engagement and quality content. This approach not only ensures that viewers are tuning in to valuable streams but also allows us to offer higher quality rewards as an incentive.

This also taps into the AFK drop farming problem, where there are streamers producing very low quality content just for the sake of people watching and claiming drops. Having the ability to blocklist specific streamers within our campaigns could be a powerful tool (not sure this exists yet?).

Eliminating the option for concurrent campaigns, at least within my category, will introduce challenges for developers and high-quality streamers, hindering our ability to fully leverage the potential of this feature.