On Twitch Drops

While I’m not really a fan of watching streamers on Twitch, I do like Twitch Drops. The concept is stupidly simple. All you have to do is make people watch a stream for a certain amount of time and they get a nice, shiny reward. The usefulness of the reward is always a bit uncertain, but it’s free, so people will take it.

There are two games I play on the regular that do Twitch Drops, Sea of Thieves and Warframe. But while they both have Twitch Drops, they do so in quite different ways.

Sea of Thieves Twitch Drops are kinda long. Normally, Sea of Thieves drops are cosmetic items, and they almost never return, so they are easy to miss if you don’t have someone to remind you every time they come up. Basically, you have to watch a streamer playing Sea of Thieves. It takes one hour to get one cosmetic, and you have to claim the first drop before the next drop starts. There are generally four tasks, which means four hours of watching streams. Luckily, there are a lot of people streaming Sea of Thieves, so you do have options. But Sea of Thieves can be a bit boring to watch, so I expect most people just put the volume on low then do other things.

On the other hand, Warframe generally does smaller Twitch Drops, mainly for watching the Warframe streams Prime Time and the Dev Stream. Generally the drop is something is pretty useful, like a riven mod or a Forma of some sort. You normally only need to watch for 30 minutes or so to get your reward, but the streams themselves are generally just over an hour long. So it’s easy to miss out if you join in late.

The bigger downside is whenever the Twitch Drop stuff ends. Streamers get to enjoy a lot more viewers with Twitch Drops, but that all disappears after the Twitch promotion ends. With nothing left to earn while watching, the big numbers of viewers disappear. Sure, you’ll get a few people who stick around after a Twitch Drop ends, but the majority will leave. That being said, especially with Sea of Thieves content, most people won’t be watching the streams at all. They just put the tab on silent and get on with their lives. I feel like a lot of streams, regardless of the game, are like that. It’s the most optimal way of getting your drops with the least amount of interaction. And it does depend heavily on the stream – when Overwatch 2 first added Twitch Drops, it was watch 4 hours for one single skin.

Twitch though has so many other ways of game-ifying both streamers and streams. From subscriptions to emotes and bits, there are other ways of gaining viewers and making money. Heck, there are stream elements to give away sails and cosmetics outside of drops. Sea of Thieves has cosmetic sets that can only be given away from streamers, in specific conditions, normally involving raffles and stuff like that.

Really though Twitch Drops are a massive boost to streamers, even if it is a temporary boost. Better than nothing, I suppose.