Twitch Gets Their Game List from Giant Bomb? How did I never know this?

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/adding-a-game-and-box-art-to-the-directory?language=en_US

ADDING A GAME TO TWITCH

Click here to learn more about adding games to Giant Bomb. Keep in mind the following:

1. Only wiki entries categorized as games will be imported to Twitch.

2. Stub pages are not sufficient. A stub page is any game page that has the following content: "This wiki page is a stub. Hit the edit button above to add to this article."

3. Games added will take up to 24 hours to be imported.

Is this blowing anyone else's mind right now? Also does GB profit from this? Probably not. If only.

I heard this pretty recently myself and was pretty surprised. It's even crazier when you consider the fact that the wiki is fan-made. That means that the effort fans went through of uploading and adding games and writing about them (so the game article isn't just a stub) is being used by Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, which is owned by the richest man in the world.

And ain't nobody getting paid for that labor.

Do they still? I think Twitch bought IGDB last year.. I figured they would have switched to that.

@bladeofcreation: yeah I imagine the only reason they haven't started using a proprietary database is because we do if for them, for free. We're chumps. Wikipedia must be more difficult to use for this purpose, right? Maybe they don't like that wikipedia can be edited by anyone as opposed to GB which requires moderator approval requirements for new accounts.

@bladeofcreation: But you're being paid with the highest of currencies.. with gratitude.

Well, not even that really.

@development: English Wikipedia is supported well enough that all edits functionally require moderator approval. If randoms edit a page, it is reverted pretty quickly by long time wiki editors unless the edit can be justified.

I suspect GB’s wiki made the cut on Twitch because of the API that makes it pretty easy to pull video game title info from wiki articles specifically categorized as game pages, whereas at the time it would‘ve been more a hassle on Wikipedia. Also lots of games on Wikipedia don’t get wiki articles because if the game doesn’t pass a certain threshold of notoriety, the editors will delete the page; on GB, my understanding is that almost no game gets denied a wiki page as long as someone is willing to create it, even if it’s very niche.

As @marino and I are the primary Wiki moderators... all I want to say is it's a long story.

@bisonhero: interesting insight. That makes sense to me. I think we should boycott til we get our allotted Bezos scrip

The joys of user-generated content surrendered to platform-holders.

@zombiepie: Anything you or Marino can share? I hope my earlier post wasn’t speaking out of turn, but it’s my best guess for why GB’s wiki somehow got sourced in the early days of Twitch.

It is a puzzling arrangement overall though, that GB continues to be the source and that Twitch doesn’t manage its own game title list. Then again, I’ve heard a lot of people blast Twitch management for having weird web dev priorities.

I guess it's mutually beneficial?

The point of the wiki is to be freely accessible (no?), and this way at least incentivizes more people to add some games to it / correct mistakes.

I've learned this from the threads that pop up what feels like every month of some streamer asking how to get a game listed on Twitch. It's a very bizarre situation.

It's a definitely a weird relationship between the two sites. Especially considering Twitch employee Mary Kish is a friend of GB. In the long run though, I have to imagine that GB providing Twitch's games database is a good thing for GB because it might bring GB to the attention of people who otherwise wouldn't have discovered the site.

Yeah I was trying to see if a game was on Twitch, and then looked up how to add it, and... yeah I had to check like 10 times to make sure I wasn't in a fugue state or reading it wrong or still half asleep. This is the only games site I visit besides Polygon's Youtube account and random youtubers once a month so I was really struggling with this knowledge I stumbled upon.

@zombiepie: Would absolutely love to hear this story one day in the future when it's free to tell

Correct. I've seen a few games listed on Twitch that use the IGDB game cover art vs. GB's wiki.

All I will say right now is that our interactions with Twitch staff have been incredibly positive and a majority of devs have understood our enforcement of the Wiki norms and rules. Likewise, the rules remain in place and apply to all edits submitted to the site, regardless of one's relationship to what is being proposed.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I think that started waay back before twitch became what it is now. Also giant bomb didn't start as just a personality site, the wiki was actually one of their big early achievements as I don't think it had been done before them. Doesn't seem like the wiki is highlighted as much as it used to be back in the day.

The wiki is also why you will get random posts from people trying to contact hr on games that just link to this site instead of their own lol.