Drops for Indie Developers

I wanted to develop a Drops app that can be used by all streamers. When I click the sign-up button, the page I end up in asks me for game company related information which I don’t have. Can somebody tell me if Drops is only for game company developers or indie developers are welcome?

Drops is specific to in game items. And rewards for a specific game/or games if a publisher (Bethesda for example).

So it’s doesn’t make sense to make a drops app for “all streamers”.

So, it’s gated to “proper game developers”

I don’t think you need to be a company, but you do need to be developing a game, as the whole point is to allow rewarding viewers’ game accounts with in-game items/achievements/whatever.

so what about streamers in IRL or Creative? does that mean they can’t use Drops in their streams?

I think you are misunderstanding Drops. To quote the docs

Drops is a tool set that supports you in granting in-game rewards to your gaming communities natively within the Twitch viewing experience. Drops reports users’ game-viewing activity to you. You define the rewards and the reward logic. Drops allows you to tailor the viewing experience to the needs of players and the economy of your game.

IRL and Creative aren’t games, and Drops isn’t something aimed at streamers but games developers to integrate into their games.

Other people don’t “play the same” IRL or Creative.

Streamers stream a $game. Viewers gets drops for the same $game that the streamer is playing.

Drops is a cross promotional way to get players of a $game to also watch streams of a $game perhaps whilst also playing the $game.

That doesn’t exactly apply to IRL/Creative

Thanks for the replies guys. I’m going to assume your responses are correct since nobody from Twitch replied. Given that, what can I use to achieve want I want to do? A Drops functionality for all streamers that can connect to the VHS API as basis for issuing rewards to viewers.

There are dozens of loyalty point systems on Twitch, and the majority of them work by polling the undocumented chatters endpiont tmi.twitch.tv/group/user/<Channel Name>/chatters and awards points to those who are in the channel. Keep in mind though that this is a list is of users that are currently logged in to chat, and not a list of those who are actually watching the stream. You will not have access to the VHS API/Drops, so the chatters endpoint is your main option.

The loyalty point systems that already exist generally require a streamer to go to their site and connect with their Twitch account, and then the service will start polling the chatters endpoint (interval, and polling when offline or online only varies depending on service). Some services also require individual users to connect to the site before their points start adding up.

From there, it’s entirely up to you how you plan to go about recording the data (as long as you follow Twitch’s developer agreement on data storage that is), displaying user points (some use bot commands, others through their site, some are starting to use Twitch Extensions), and issuing rewards.

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thanks for the reply Dist, appreciate it.

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