Twitch Giveaway Tool: Chat Draws That Do Not Fall Over
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Today we are launching Twitch Giveaway, the sister tool to our Kick one: free keyword draws in your Twitch chat, with the same engine behind them.
How it works
You pick a keyword, your viewers type it in chat, and each person becomes one entry. When you are ready you press roll and a winner comes out. That is the whole thing from the viewer's side.
- The keyword can sit anywhere in the message, so someone typing it alongside a wallet address still counts.
- One entry per person, no matter how many times they spam it.
- Sub luck, if you want your subscribers to have better odds.
- A timer or your own hand: collect for an hour, close it yourself, or leave it open and draw again and again through the stream.
Nothing to connect before you start
Twitch chat can be read without any credentials at all, so a giveaway starts collecting the moment you create it. You only connect your Twitch account for two things: to prove the channel is yours, and to switch on the follower and ban requirements, which Twitch quite rightly shows nobody but the channel itself.
It does not run in your browser
The giveaway lives on our servers, not in your tab. Close the tab, lose your connection, reboot mid-stream: entries keep arriving and you pick up exactly where you were. The browser is only a window onto something that is running somewhere else.
Fast at any size
We load tested it with 250.000 entrants and two million chat messages. The draw answers in well under a second, and the tenth draw costs the same as the first. The amount of data moving to your browser is identical at 100 entrants and at 250.000, which is the part that usually breaks.
Your viewers can check the draw themselves
Before entries open we publish a hash of a secret seed. After the draw we publish the seed itself and the entry list. Anyone can take those, recompute the draw in their own browser and land on the same winner. If we had picked the winner first and made up the numbers afterwards, the hash would not match.
The entry list carries no names and no platform IDs. Every entrant appears as a pseudonym instead, so a draw stays checkable without publishing a list of everybody who watches your channel.
Entry requirements
You can limit entry to followers, to a minimum follow duration, a minimum subscription length or a minimum account age. One of those is free on Twitch that is not free elsewhere: how many months somebody has been subscribed arrives with every message they send, so a subscription requirement costs no lookup at all.
Follower and ban requirements are the ones that need your connected account. Without it they refuse rather than wave everyone through, because a requirement that quietly stops applying is worse than one you were never offered.
Built for stream
Every giveaway comes with an OBS browser source showing the live entrant count and the winner reveal. There is also a winner chat box on your own screen: once someone has been drawn, everything they say in chat is pulled out for you, so you can ask for a wallet address without hunting through a chat moving at hundreds of messages a second.
Getting started
Create a giveaway, name your channel and open it. Connect your Twitch account when you want the follower requirements.