Today, Twitch removed the Unreal Tournament category from their site, meaning streamers can no longer select UT as their game when streaming.
Why did this happen?
When Epic released UT4, they named it "Unreal Tournament", identical to UT99's original title. Twitch relies on IGDB (a database akin to IMDB, but for games) for game titles and cover art. However, if a game is officially cancelled or removed, it's also removed from Twitch's categories.
Recently, UT4 was marked as cancelled on IGDB, leading to the removal of the Unreal Tournament category from Twitch, along with its multiple hundreds of thousands of followers.
Why is this a big deal?
Our communities regularly host events and pugs, broadcasting them on Twitch. Streaming under the UT category helped both old and new players discover and join our communities, enhancing the game's visibility and longevity. The absence of the UT category on Twitch means that we no longer have a home on Twitch for where we can showcase our game to the world.
What can we do about it?
Many community members have contacted Twitch and IGDB support. Our primary recourse is to submit a request on Twitch's Uservoice, a platform for feedback like this. We've started a thread there and need your support.
Please upvote the thread using your Twitch account, and leave a comment if you feel like you should
If you don't have a Twitch account, please consider creating one to support this game we cherish. We need to unite and show Twitch that our game and our communities are still alive and kicking, and we need our category back. The more votes we get, the more likely we will be to get this seen by someone at Twitch.
You can add your vote and comment to the thread here:
https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/310 ... till-in-us
Thank you in advance,
UT99 communities
Auto merged new post submitted 8 hours 1 minute later
@everyone
https://m.twitch.tv/directory/category/ ... tournament
You all did it! They re-made the category now as UT99!
(Please follow the new category as it lost all the followers from the previous one)
Cheers you absolute legends!
Kudos go to @Berserker for reporting the issue, @soupy for the announcement, uservoice link and further work to get this back running, the IGDB for escalating this further to twitch, and of course all of you who contributed!
