I've been thinking about this from the other side because I'm an indie developer and I've been building Twitch interaction into a music game.

The idea is that viewers can type !play and get entered into the next race as a driver, then cheer on their racer while the streamer can either race alongside them or commentate.

What surprised me when testing it was how different it feels when someone's username is actually on screen. Even though they're not directly controlling the racer, suddenly they have someone to root for.

For those of you streaming to smaller audiences, what kinds of things have actually managed to turn lurkers into people who start chatting?

I've been looking at things like Marbles, channel points, song requests and viewer games, but I'm interested in what genuinely works when you've only got a handful of people watching.

I've just released my first game, Rhythm Racer, into Early Access and one of the main modes was built specifically around Twitch interaction.

Viewers don't need to own the game. They type !play in chat and they're entered as a racer alongside the streamer. The race itself is generated from whatever music the streamer chooses, so you can even take song requests and turn them into races.

I'm particularly interested in smaller streams because I think this works better when you actually know the people in chat and they can cheer on their own racers.

I'd be happy to give some Steam keys to small streamers who genuinely want to try it out and give me feedback on how the Twitch side works in a real stream.