Introducing Drops
As a convenience, here are links to the Twitch Developers site and the Developer Portal.
As a game developer, you’re always looking for new ways to engage players within your games. Today we’re excited to bring you Drops, a program which will help you increase your game’s engagement and retention by letting you consistently, reliably, and directly reward your players for engaging with your games on Twitch.
This program enables you to grant in-game items or “Drops” to your gaming community natively within the Twitch viewing experience. Powered by the Viewer Heartbeat Service and Twitch Identity, we report game viewing activity to you, enabling you to reward your viewers and broadcasters. As the game developer, Drops allows you to tailor the viewing experience to the needs of the players and economy of your game.
We have experimented with Drops thanks to the help of a few key partners, working together to integrate and run programs.
But beginning today, any interested developer will have the ability to sign up to the Developer Portal and integrate Drops into their games — completely self-service!
Need access to the developer portal? Request access!
Once requested, check out the Drops product page for more juicy details and to find out if Drops is right for your game!
We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Hi-Rez Studios on this launch. They’ve been running Drops programs in both Paladins and SMITE over the last few months, showcasing the awesome power of Drops at Hi-Rez Expo in early January (read more about that here).
|We saw a dramatic increase in both the total number of viewers and time spent per viewer since we implemented drops. The increase in overall viewers and viewer average time was so material that we really want to build on the program going into this year. — Todd Harris, COO, Hi-Rez Studios
Twitch will be showcasing Drops at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year. We’ll display the tech, explain how it works, and help you sign up to learn more and participate. Swing by our booth #1602! Simultaneously, Hi-Rez Studios will be running Drops in Both SMITE and Paladins during the entire week of GDC, so be sure to check out Drops in action the entire week of GDC!
We can’t wait to see what amazing Drops programs you come up with! Build something cool? Share it to us on Twitter @TwitchDev! We also want your feedback on how we can continue to improve Drops and our other developer APIs. Please submit your feedback on Twitch UserVoice!