How to use Next Fest streams as a playtest: a checklist

A streamer is not a recruited playtester. They picked your demo themselves and play for their audience, not for you. You see how people play without anyone guiding them, and you hear a lot of what they think, but you can't ask a follow-up question. Plan for that.

Before the fest

• Check that your game has its own Twitch category. Without one, streamers file your demo under “Games + Demos” or under a similar game, and you can't find their streams by category. Twitch takes categories from IGDB, where you can add your game with a Twitch login (Twitch Help).
• Spell the name the same way on Steam, on IGDB and in your press kit, so that the category and the stream titles match.
• Write down what you want to learn: the tutorial, a difficulty spike, whether the first boss reads as a boss. With a question, you know which minutes of a two-hour stream to look at.

During the fest

• List the streams every day while they are live. The category page shows who is streaming now. Note the channel, the day and the language.
• Don't save them all for after the fest. VODs expire 7, 14 or 60 days after the stream, and a 7-day VOD from the first day expires on the fest's last day (how long Twitch VODs stay online).

When you watch a stream

• Watch each session to the end. In our reports, more confusion was marked late in the part we analysed than early: 16% of 615 moments in the first quarter, 32% in the last.
• Write down the minute of every moment that matters: the player is confused, frustrated, hits a bug, quits, or clearly enjoys something. The minute in the VOD is your evidence when you explain the change to your team later.
• Separate what they did from what they said. A streamer who calls the game easy but fails the same jump five times is showing you a section worth a closer look.

After the fest

• Group your notes by problem, not by stream. Two streamers who can't find the exit of the same room are one problem, seen twice.
• Look first at what came up in two or more streams. In our reports, 15% of 906 problems came up in more than one stream of the same game. The rest were seen once: worth checking, not yet a pattern. Either way, watch the minute yourself before you change the game.
• Don't wait for a second report of a crash. The two-streams rule is for design problems; a crash or a lost save is worth fixing even if only one streamer hit it.

Problems that came up in several streams

From our game pages, one per game. The titles are our summaries of what the streamers ran into.