This document outlines how to implement Twitch Drops to enhance game engagement by rewarding viewers with in-game items for watching streams. It details prerequisites, implementation steps, campaign creation, and architecture considerations. The roadmap for future enhancements and resources for developers are also included.

1. How to enable Drops to
increase your game's
engagement

2. Introductions
Travis Brown
Lead Integration Success Engineer
twitch.tv/travistyoj
@travistyoj

3. #TwitchDevDay
Overview
Introduction
Prerequisites
Implementation
Architecture
Roadmap
1
2
3
4
5

4. How can Twitch help
increase your game’s
engagement?
How do you define and measure
engagement?
How is your game doing on Twitch
now?
Who are your biggest influencers
on Twitch?
What’s your measured trajectory?
#TwitchDevDay

5. Twitch Drops
Reward players with in-game items
for watching your game on Twitch
Increase viewership of major events
Bring back lapsed players
Receive simple feed of viewership
data sent to your defined endpoint
#TwitchDevDay
Congrats!
You just earned a Drop.

6. Prerequisites

7. Twitch Drops:
Prerequisites
Identity
Entitlement
In-game Item Support
Consumables
Durables
Exclusives
HTTPS Endpoint
#TwitchDevDay

8. Implementation

9. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
OAuth2, Authorization Code Flow
Plan your scopes
At a minimum: viewing_activity_read
Securely persist access and refresh
tokens
Account Linking
#TwitchDevDay

10. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
Following account link, immediately register viewer to
VHS:
PUT api.twitch.tv/kraken/user/vhs
Provide your own player identifier
You can also check registration status
GET api.twitch.tv/kraken/user/vhs
Account VHS User Registration
#TwitchDevDay

11. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
Where should the heartbeats go?
Must be HTTPS
Whitelist our IPs:
52.36.56.122
52.36.64.12
52.25.167.56
Respond to failures properly
VHS Endpoint
#TwitchDevDay

12. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
How are you processing each heartbeat?
What channels are you rewarding?
Official
Affiliated Broadcasters
All
How are you aggregating heartbeat data?
Heartbeat Processing
#TwitchDevDay

13. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
Create Drops Campaigns on the Twitch Developer
Site
Target by game, channel, time
Notify unlinked viewers watching your game what
they could be getting
Drops Campaign
#TwitchDevDay

14. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
What type of items are you rewarding?
Durables - Skins, Hats, Cosmetics
Consumables - Chests, Currency
Exclusives
When does a viewer receive an item?
Cumulative
Chance
Event-driven
Combination
Reward Logic
#TwitchDevDay

15. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
Announcing Drops Reward Notifications!
Let your viewers know they’ve received a Drop using
the Twitch notification system
Notifications surface and persist in dedicated area
Documentation available next week at dev.twitch.tv/
docs/drops
Reward Notification
#TwitchDevDay

16. Twitch Drops:
Implementation
Create simple internal tooling to create your own
Campaigns
Define business rules, reward logic parameters
Decrease engineering effort for each campaign
Community Management Toolkit
#TwitchDevDay

17. Architecture

18. Twitch Drops:
Architecture
Process Heartbeats Asynchronously
VHS Endpoint should just write heartbeat and
return 200
Downstream processing
Avoid Single-points-of-failure in pipeline
Use a message bus or a queue for recoverability
Grant Entitlements in batches
Store Heartbeats for analysis, correlate with player
behavior
Common Patterns
#TwitchDevDay

19. Twitch Drops: Architecture
Game State Input
VHS
Game
Server
VHS Endpoint Entitlement
System
#TwitchDevDay

20. Twitch Drops: Architecture
Hosting on AWS
API Gateway
Amazon Athena
S3
Lambda
DynamoDB
Entitlement
System
VHS
#TwitchDevDay

21. What’s Next?

22. Drops Roadmap
Reward Notifications
Visual Indicators
Stay up to date at:
https://dev.twitch.tv/roadmap
#TwitchDevDay

23. Still want more?
Check out our code samples:
https://github.com/twitchdev/drops-samples/
Visit our dedicated developer site:
https://dev.twitch.tv/drops
Ask questions on our forum’s dedicated Drops section:
https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/c/game-dev/drops
Follow us on Twitter
@travistyoj
@TwitchDev
#TwitchDevDay

24. Thank you