I am a member of the team developing the web game songbattle.io. For the last year, we have been trying to establish songbattle.io as a category on Twitch. We are aware that this is usually handled via IGDB. However, IGDB does not want us to be in their database, and they have explicitly directed us to Twitch instead, for manual creation of the category.
After much back and forth with IGDB, Twitch support and UserVoice (we have an ongoing UserVoice post here), Twitch support directed us to the developer support, as the team to be addressed for this:
I understand that you would like to request to add a game category to Twitch.
For this particular request, please reach out to our Developers Support which will be the best suited team to assist you.
Hence, is there anyone from the Twitch team who may be able to help us out with this? We can supply all the information required (added the infos we assume you need below), and are available for discussion on what else may be needed.
Thanks a lot in advance!
With best regards
Sebastian Wilczek
PS:
Values we assume you require for the creation of a category:
Description: songbattle.io is the new favourite browser game for every music loving streamer or friend group! Engage with your community or friends in exciting battles competing your favourite songs against each other.
Your site seems to be encouraging breaking copyright, Twitch’s Community Guidelines, and Spotify’s ToS, so I would expect for legal reason Twitch may not want to support your ‘game’ as a category and by IGDB standards it doesn’t meet the requirements of a game either, especially as at the time of writing this the streams that are using your service under the ‘music’ category are all streaming copyrighted content they do not own, and one is rebroadcasting content from Spotify, breaking their ToS.
First of all, thank you both for the quick response, much appreciated!
Regarding the “encouraging breaking copyright” part, I would like to clarify that songbattle is intended as a party game first and foremost. Unfortunately, if people use our game to rebroadcast copyrighted content to other services such as Twitch, we have no control over that, the same way as we can not stop a streamer from opening services such as Spotify directly in their stream. I would consider it up to the individual streamer to make sure they are aware of the content they are sharing, given the Twitch guidelines.
If there is a legal barrier that would stop the game from being a category, we can work with that, but for the last year, we have received no form of answer, be that legal concern or otherwise, only radio silence.
Regarding going to UserVoice, I understand that this is the documented way to go about it. However, we monitored the Discover section of UserVoice in the last year, and there has been little to no interaction on Twitchs behalf in the forum. Matter of fact, some of the posts there have been unanswered for more than nine years. We are therefore trying to reach anyone from the team managing categories, as we are not finding any form or contact this way.
Do you know if the forum is actively monitored? If so, what is required to have administrators engage there, and if not, what would be the best way to reach that team? We would love to discuss this, especially if there are legal concerns, but for now, we don’t have any info as to who to talk to.
