Two years ago, we introduced the game developer chat badge to provide a unique way for game developers to be more visible and verifiable in chat. While this feature has been beneficial for some developers to identify themselves on Twitch, we have made the difficult decision to decommission this chat badge to restore our Developer Organization review process.
How is the chat badge related to Developer Organizations?
Developer Organizations allow multiple Twitch accounts to collectively manage game categories, Extensions, Drops campaigns, and more including the visibility of the game developer chat badge. The increased volume of organization requests as a result of the chat badge, both legitimate and illegitimate, contributed to a noticeable delay in our reviews and an increasingly difficult-to-manage queue.
To restore organization requests, the Game Developer chat badge will be decommissioned and the current organization request queue will be cleared.
What’s changing?
On or soon after October 21, 2024, the game developer chat badge will no longer be visible on Twitch and the toggle in the developer console will be disabled. Developer Organization reviews will resume in November according to the details below.
Do I need to take action?
Twitch accounts with an enabled game developer chat badge will automatically have it removed and no action is required.
Developers who have submitted a Developer Organization request that included a game ownership claim prior to November 1, 2024 will have their review completed before December 1, 2024. An email will be sent upon completion.
Developers who have submitted a Developer Organization request that did not include a game ownership claim prior to November 1, 2024 will receive an email that the request was denied to reestablish our review process. Developers who receive this email are encouraged to resubmit if they intend to use Developer Organizations for features other than the game developer chat badge.
Would the game developer chat badge ever be reconsidered?
The current implementation of the chat badge has challenges to overcome before it could be reintroduced. A global chat badge was straightforward to release, but a contextual identifier that shows only when a streamer is playing your game would be best. There are no plans to consider this functionality at this time, but it may be re-evaluated in the future given the potential to facilitate communication between developers and the creators who love playing their games.
I feel the same way of @Marenthyu . I think that will be harder for us to differentiate us from impostors and/or fans. Hope this functionality come back in the future in other form.
Btw, I made an small app that alert me if somebody is playing my game so i can pop-in to chat, make friends and get some feedback.
While the Game Developer badge was a nice idea, as people originally suggested when the idea was first being discussed it would have been better if it was only visible in channels that have their category set to one of the games owned by that users org.
Unfortunately because it was a global badge it was easily abused. The number of categories on Twitch that got approved by IGDB that were just ‘press A to jump, congrats you pressed A that’s the end of the game’ web games, some ‘games’ were web games that didn’t even function and couldn’t possibly be played, all trying to get the chat badge because it would show on all channels not just those playing their games.
Then there was the issue with the badge having a link out of Twitch to the orgs site, which had minimal if any auditing after the org was created because often these links pointed to google.com, non existent URLs, domain squatter pages, and some straight up advertising by directing to their own Twitch channel.
There have also been several legitimate orgs that were unable to use Drops as part of game launches or marketing campaigns because the flood of Org/Game requests prevented them from getting their legitimate request approved.
Yes there are ways that it could be implemented that doesn’t encourage abuse (such as only showing the badge if the channel is playing that game), but that leads to more technical overhead and more dev time if it even is at all possible.
On the ‘stricter rules’ aspect, I don’t think it should be Twtich/IGDB’s job to gatekeep what is/isn’t a game, but rather just not implement features that are open to abuse such as the Game Developer badge. If by stricter rules you mean on Org creation and their URLs, well then there’s the issue of it taking more staff time to verify and periodically audit, which would be yet another investment of dev time away from other features.
Keep in mind that only a tiny fraction of the Twitch userbase had the Game Developer badge, out of those, not all of them were legitimate, and while there were examples here of people using it to talk in channels playing their games often people using the badge were just chatting like any other user about things that had nothing to do whatsoever with their game in channels that had no relation to their game at all, so it was purely for decoration and/or showing off.
So while the badge was nice (as someone who had the badge), it’s benefit was very minimal compared to how much effort it was likely to be for Twitch to maintain it and handle the flood of users trying to abuse the system to get it. I’d love to see it back in a much more restricted form, but I’d also much rather see other game developers get to create an org and run Drops Campaigns and do cool things not being limited by not being able to get their Org request accepted due to the backlog, and this also gives Twitch time to focus on other features that may have more impact.
While I kinda understand why it was removed, due to people sending developers a whispers and asking them to add them to the organization which was annoying and of course against the ToS.
Maybe reconsider adding this but with better moderation or something?