Karaoke has come to Twitch with the launch of Twitch Sings, a live streaming karaoke game for the brave, foolish and drunk. Announced at TwitchCon Europe in collaboration with Harmonix, Sings is a game integrated into Twitch that lets broadcasters perform any of 2,000 songs and interact with their audience via a variety of voting mechanics.
Sings might seem a little out of character for the real-game oriented Twitch, but the integration is very good, and it seems to be a reasonably successful first entry into the world of games.
“Twitch Sings unites the fun and energy of being at a live show with the boundless creativity of streamers to make an amazing shared interactive performance,” says Joel Wade, the game’s executive producer. “Many games are made better on Twitch, but we believe there is a huge opportunity for those that are designed with streaming and audience participation at their core.”
Viewers will be able to interact with the streamer via emotes, virtual ovations, and votes that can dictate the next song or special challenges like hiding the lyrics or singing with your tongue out. Streamers can choose to perform duets with other streamers’ past performances, they can add voice effects to sound better or more ridiculous, and they can choose to sing as a virtual avatar and break out some dance moves.
Twitch says that Sings is launching globally today, though we don’t yet know how well it will support languages other than English. For what it’s worth, their FAQ is available in eleven languages. And notably, Russia, Ukraine, and Korea won’t get the service at all due to licensing issues with the song library. Twitch Sings is available for free.
