Tag: twitch api

Latest Twitch Extension Release: IGDB.com Game Information

This will be the first post in a two/three parter on this extension since it also serves as a good example on how to utilise a number of Twitch and IGDB products/API’s to achieve the end solution! But today just an announcement post!

One of the features of the Dropped Frames Extension, that is used during Dropped Frames on itmeJP’s channel on Wednesday’s, is that I’ll push a Game Information box to the extension that shows information about the game the panel is talking about. That information box will collect information from the IGDB.com API and then present that information to the viewer. Heres a quick example screenshot for Mind Scanners:

Dropped Frames example of the IGDB.com information widget

You can see on the left the “box” with the cover art appears on the left over the Game name that is baked into the overlay and on user mouse over of the box the game information box is then displayed. Title, brief synopsis, cover art and store information are presented.

When I showed this off in the IGDB discord (prior to E3), I was asked, if this was a publicly available thing, and I replied, sorta but not really. Which then led me to go and create a seperate extension for anyone to use, during a smidge of down time I had recently!

So I present the IGDB.com Game Information Extension!

The first IGDB.com Game Information Extension screenshot

It is availble to both Twitch Mobile and Desktop users. On Desktop both Component and Panel are supported. I usually recommend the Component slot as it saves users having to scroll down, and it’s auto collapsed out of the way until a user clicks on the [IGDB] taskbar icon. And generally speaking most streamers have the Component slots free anyway. ITS FREE REAL ESTATE MAN!

The three views of the Extension. Information, Screenshots, Stores and Platforms.

Via the power of Twitch EventSub, it will even automatically self refresh if you change games during a stream and will gracefully fail back if you pick a game that is not on IGDB.com or a category that is not a game, such as Special Events or Just Chatting, it’ll just show the Twitch Box art/title instead.

Streamers will just need to link their Twitch accounts via the Extensions Configuration view, or the Extension Mini site, to enable auto updating!

Examples using Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elite Dangerous and the non game category Just Chatting.

To checkout the extension, or to see live streamers running the Extension, and to see the install instructions pop over to the mini site for the extension over at twitch.extensions.barrycarlyon.co.uk/igdb/ or visit the extension directly on Twitch.

The beauty of IGDB.com is that it POWERS Twitch’s categories and being crowd sourced, if the information is wrong, outdated or missing, anyone can submit a fix or change and await an IGDB Admin to accept the change.

I also wrote about the Extension over on the Twitch Reddit and on my Twitch Extensions Twitter, so feel free to spead the word!

And as a final note: this is a third party Extension not affiliated with IGDB.com, I just got permission to use their brand assets!

KRAKEN IS DEAD long live Helix!

Last week finally announced the deprecation data for Kraken also know as v5 Twitch’s legacy API.

You can find the details of which over on the Twitch Blog or TwitchDev’s Twitter at

For many Developers using Twitch API products this means little beyond there being a date to make sure you have moved everything you need to to Helix/New API. And that date is February 28th 2022.

Twitch will also be running a phased Shutdown timeline with periodic outages on the Legacy API of increasing length during the start February starting on the 7th at 11am PDT, and full details of that are on the earlier linked blog post.

For NEW developers looking to work with the Twitch API products, as of last week you can’t access the Legacy API at all, if you have never used the Legacy Twitch API you just can’t access it.

and those that have not made requests to the v5 API before July 15, 2021 will no longer be able to access v5.

TwitchDev on the blog

Other things to note is the end of WebSub based Webhooks as well, that ends in September! Details about that are also on the Twitch Blog

So now is the time to get your feature requests for the New API and/or any missing features into the Twitch Uservoice theres a few new ones popped up recently for “missing” New API features. So get your voice heard on missing things. Or you can check out my super exiting Google Doc I have for tracking a number of User Voices I’m intersted in and/or have created you can find that here!

And if you need help on Migration from the Legacy API to New Twitch API, check the migration guide or Join Us on the TwitchDev Discord or Forums, see the Developer Support page for those links!

Update: This also effects a number of Extension EBS endpoints! Thankfully this sort of update won’t require extension review, since it’s EBS endpoints! Todays Announcement on that is here on the forums

Twitch API Examples

I spend a lot of time on the Twitch Developer forums and Discord helping out other third party developers. That among other things led to me being asked to become a Twitch Ambassador, which is probably a story for another post.

As part of spending a lot of time helping of Forums/Discord, it become useful to write up some examples in various languages for people to refer to, since some people prefer code examples over documentation, and it’s easier to demonstrate how to tie multiple calls/endpoints together for the desired result.

To that end my GitHub Repo at barrycarlyon/twitch_misc now exists and holds examples from Authentication flows (from Implicit to server access and regular user in-between), extension config/pubsub, and examples for Webhooks and the new Eventsub (which is worth a look!). So if you are looking for some examples do checkout the Repository. Some of the examples can even be tested on GitHub itself via GitHub pages, the examples available are listed in the readme and at the Github Pages site.

Twitch also recently made the requirement that all calls to helix (aka the New API) need to be Authenticated using a Bearer, which made it difficult for Extensions to get the viewers details. So to that end I created a basic example of how to do that in an Extension with a “User Profile Extension” example. Which is at BarryCarlyon/twitch_profile_extension. So this covers a good way to handle that flow.

Right now most of the examples are nodeJS, or PHP, but there are some in Python kicking about!

I’ll be looking at adding more examples and other examples in other languages as we go!

I’m usually really bad at commenting my code as I prefer reading the code, but I made a conscious effort to add useful code comments on these repos!