Watching Streams for Hours

It’s not as straightforward as it sounds. First, you have to find out if there are even Twitch Drops for the games you play. If so, you then have to find a channel where drops are enabled. And finally, you have to watch for the required amount of time. What if the channel goes offline beforehand? Then you have to find a new one. And you can’t mute the stream either, at least not through the Twitch player. Muted streams don’t count as watching.

While this approach is understandable, as Twitch wants to persuade users to watch and interact, some drops require several hours of watch time. I don’t want to watch Twitch that much, nor do I want to constantly monitor whether the current stream is still live. My PC runs almost all day due to working from home, but having a stream running in the background during meetings is just annoying.

Automating Drop Collection

But what would the internet be if there wasn’t a solution for everything? This is where the program Twitch Drop Miner comes into play. The program is quite simple. You log into your Twitch account within the application, and the miner starts collecting drops. At first, it just goes for anything that offers a drop.

You can then narrow this down in the settings. You can either exclude certain games or, as I do, select your games from a list. Once the settings are saved, the program runs in the background and regularly checks if there are drops for the selected games. If there are, the miner connects to a stream and watches until the drop is claimed or is no longer available. If there are multiple games with drops, it goes through the list from top to bottom, collecting for one game after another.

Not Perfect

However, the tool isn’t quite perfect. For one, it’s highly dependent on Twitch itself. Naturally, Twitch wants to prevent people from automatically collecting drops without any interaction. Consequently, they regularly make changes intended to hinder programs like the Twitch Drop Miner. In this case, you’re dependent on the tool’s developer.

The second limitation is that the miner doesn’t handle it well when you actively watch a stream with the same account, especially if it’s not for a drop campaign. In my tests, it was best to simply close the Twitch Drop Miner and reopen it only after I was done actively watching streams.

Conclusion

Sure, it’s not what Twitch envisions and probably goes against their terms of service to unlock drops without actually being active on Twitch or watching a stream. On the other hand, it’s gotten to the point where you sometimes only have a few days to unlock a drop by watching for several hours. Who has time for that? I certainly don’t.

Even though the Twitch Drop Miner isn’t perfect, it generally does what it’s supposed to do. I’m really glad it exists, so I don’t have to check if there are drops for my games, nor do I have to worry about when and how to unlock them. I turn on my PC for work, and the tool automatically collects the drops for me in the background. For that reason, it gets a clear recommendation from me.