Aux Battles Goes Live on Twitch

This is the biggest thing that's shipped since the initial build, and it took real, sustained work to get right: Aux Battles, live on a Twitch stream, with the streamer's own chat acting as the crowd.

Why Twitch

The game was always built for a group already hanging out together, and a Twitch stream is exactly that, just with the group numbering in the hundreds or thousands instead of a handful of friends in a living room. A streamer running an aux battle live turns "everyone submits a song" into a genuinely collaborative moment with an audience that's already there and already paying attention.

What Changed, For Streamers and Viewers

A streamer gets a dedicated way to run a private battle that a random person can't wander into just by guessing a room code, plus a public submission link that viewers use instead of the streamer's own room. Viewers submit a song either by pasting a link straight into chat or through that submission page, and both routes end up represented the same way on the leaderboard, chat's picks sit right alongside anyone else's. That's the level this stays at: what a streamer and a viewer actually experience, not how any of it gets enforced under the hood.

The Three-Day Reality of Shipping It

It's fair to say this took real work: getting chat submissions, live song playback and moderation all working together smoothly in one sitting is not a small ask, and it's fair to say it wasn't fully smooth on day one either. What comes after this post is basically three days of finding out what breaks when real chat traffic hits a brand-new feature.

The search numbers moved the most they'd moved yet, right around this: July 20th, the day before launch, hit 51 clicks and 307 impressions, the first time the site crossed 300 daily impressions. Launch day itself, July 21st, landed at 40 clicks and 227 impressions. July 22nd pushed further, 51 clicks and 187 impressions with a 27% click-through rate, the best click-through day yet at that point.