As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to drive new players to my games and boost retention among existing players using Twitch’s “Drops” program.
Twitch Drops are a program provided by the livestreaming platform Twitch that allow a streamer’s audience to earn in-game rewards for the game the streamer is playing by simply watching the streamer. This creates a mutually beneficial relationship between a developer and a streamer, because players of the developer’s game will be encouraged to watch the streamer so they unlock in-game loot, and viewers of the streamer will be encouraged to try the game out. This helps to strengthen both the game’s player base and the streamer’s viewer base!
Here’s how it works for developers:
- On Twitch, a developer claims the corresponding stream category for their game.
- The developer creates and configures a drop campaign from their Twitch developer dashboard for their game’s stream category.
- From their game, the developer allows players to link their game account with their Twitch account.
- The game fetches the player’s drop campaign information using the Twitch API and uses this information to award in-game items or rewards.
Here’s how it works for streamers:
- A streamer checks the Drops page in their creator dashboard.
- The streamer chooses a game to enable drops for in their stream, and connects their Twitch account to their account for that game.
- The streamer streams that game’s category.
And that’s it! Any viewers watching that streamer will now make progress on that drop campaign just by watching the streamer. Once a viewer watches for long enough, the campaign completes and they can redeem their in-game rewards by linking their Twitch account to their game account.
Here’s what that looks like for a streamer, using the popular game “Genshin Impact” as an example:
And here’s what a viewer of a streamer with this campaign enabled would see:
However, there are two aspects of the process that cannot be realized by just developers alone:
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Allowing players to link their Twitch accounts and their Roblox accounts. We can’t do this kind of authentication from just within our own games. This would need to be supported at the platform level, accessible to users through their settings page, and exposed to developers via an engine API.
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Allowing streamers to stream in the corresponding categories for our games. Twitch does not have categories for individual Roblox games, only one big umbrella category for all of Roblox. This means that Roblox would either need to work with Twitch on establishing an avenue for a developer to acquire a category for their game, or give some form of aid or guidance to developers on acquiring a category for their game.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to “partner” with streamers and content creators in order to help funnel new players into my games, as well as improve retention among existing players. Additionally, allowing developers to leverage this powerful program would help ease some of the painful discovery issues plaguing the Roblox platform right now by empowering developers, to an extent, to take their game’s discovery into their own hands.