Twitch Sings, the karaoke game on the streaming platform, will be shut down on January 1, 2021. The announcement was made via a Twitch blog post, in which the company explained the decision had been taken “to invest in broader tools and services that will help support and grow the entire music community on Twitch.”
While the announcement will be bad news for content creators on Twitch Sings, it does not seem to have been a popular category. It is a lowly 141 in the weekly charts, averaging 1,063 viewers in the last week. Since the game launched, it has only cleared a peak of 50,000 once.
Defenders of Twitch Sings may point towards the game’s trends, which are almost universally positive. Average and peak viewers, average and peak channels, and daily follows gained have been rising since the game launched, although when examined over the last month, the trends begin to slope downwards, which might explain why Twitch decided to wrap it up.
Music itself is a very popular category on Twitch, with over 3.6 million followers in total. Twitch Sings makes up a tiny proportion of that, with just 161,000 followers to its name. Even in the Rhythm & Music Game genre, itself a subsection of Music, Twitch Sings is currently tied for third with Geometry Dash, as Beat Saber and Osu! sit comfortably ahead.
“We are grateful for all the streamers and singers who contributed to the Sings community, making it one of the most inspiring groups within Twitch,” the platform says in its blog post. Twitch confirmed that it will release its backlog of 400 songs from now until December 1, when it will start removing certain songs and clips as copyright contracts run their course. On January 1, the game will shut down for good.
