Twitch acquires gaming database site IGDB to improve its search and discovery

Serge here, parf of RAWG's team, which is a somewhat competitive product to IGDB.

First off, that's some great news, of course! I sent my congrats to IGDB today's morning. A very logical acquisition with lots of synergy potential. Surely though, Twitch will find find many other interesting ways to incorporate the data into their product apart from “better search” which is funny (Twitch under Amazon can't make a sufficient search? Really?). I'd expect more fancy products on Twitch utilizing the data—from reco engines and discovery algorithms to creator and company pages.

We at RAWG also noticed much interest concerning multiplatform games database when we launched our own free API. Each day I reply to one or two letters from students, aspiring coders, startups, non-profits, researchers and international corps. Turns out there are not so many places where you can find good data on all games. And products from small bots on Reddit and Discord to huge search engines like Yandex are happy to use our API to provide better experience.

I think the market needs an easy-to-use solution to build new services and enrich existing ones. The deal between Twitch and IGDB shows that the market does not only need it but also actively seeks opportunities to get a hold of such data first. Let's hope that when IGDB releases their Pro-tier API for free in the future it will stay for a long while, so that a lot of other products can benefit from it.