Way back in 2014, Twitch announced a feature
where you could follow your favourite games (or categories) to enhanced your experience and find the content you want to watch much quicker. This feature is still present and I personally use it quite a bit because I tend to watch streams of the games I love as opposed to the streamers.
What exactly does following a game do and how do you do it? This is what we’re going to cover in this article today.
What happens when you follow a game on Twitch?
When you follow a game or a category it does a couple of things. The first, is that it gives a big hint on Twitch about the content you’re after. They will start putting it in the left hand side of the main navigation “recommended channels” of people playing the same gamers or similar games who you don’t follow.
Interestingly, it doesn’t necessarily need to be people who are actively playing the games, either. In this example, MattRPD is playing Dead by Daylight (which I don’t follow) but I am aware he has played games that I do follow. Threedogg is a streamer who I have never watched and isn’t playing a game I follow but on closer inspection he has played games that I do follow in the past. Twitch obviously thinks he is a good match for me, and they’re probably right.
So, following games can have these effects on your experience.
On mobile it is more or less the same.
So, how do you follow games on Twitch?
Finding games to follow is dead simple and there’s several ways to do it. The easiest is to use the browse section. Searching for the game you follow.
Click on the game you want to follow and then press the follow button.
It is as simple as following a streamer.
On the mobile Twitch app it is a little different and hidden away. Follow the same steps but when looking at the game, tap the heart in the top right.
What if I follow only one game on Twitch?
If you followed only the one game you would get a lot more recommended content towards that one game but not exclusively. Twitch’s algorithms will make suggestions based on similar games as well. If you only follow Resident Evil 2, you may occasionally get recommendations for Silent Hill streams and streamers. Likewise, those who follow just Call of Duty, might get recommendations for Doom or Battlefield.
I can’t see the games I follow on Twitch
There is the possibility of following too many games which means some games may not get recommended or others get priorities. This makes sense as there’s only so much space on the Twitch UI to fit them all in. FiSouthpaw on Reddit says “For me it misses only some smaller, not so popular games, so I’ve been assuming that those missing categories are because no one is currently streaming those games”.
The fix it seems is to reduce your circle of games you follow OR bookmark the URLs of the games that you want to keep an eye on. The most common followed games to disappear are the obscure titles and games which are simply not streamed often.
I follow SIGNALIS which is an indie horror game and it never seems to come up.
