Clocking in at 21 hours and 303 songs performed live, Todd Geritz finished live-streaming his first self-made challenge of the karaoke game “Twitch Sings,” co-developed by the eponymous streaming platform and Harmonix. In something of a speedrun, he performed each song as a duet with a different member of the game’s tightknit community of streamers, pushing Geritz’s average viewer count from 55 to over 700. The stream, a celebration of his first anniversary of streaming on Twitch, was bursting with friendly vibes, a welcome reprieve at a time when covid-19 restrictions had many people stuck inside. An invitation to be a Twitch partner waited in his inbox the next morning.

Today, the Twitch and Harmonix developed game is nowhere to be found. No archived streams, no user-selected highlights and no fan-created clips remain on the platform. Laws outside of the average user’s control shut down the community. Now, nearly a year later, those who got their start playing “Twitch Sings” are still feeling the effects of such a massive shift.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to close ‘Twitch Sings’ on Jan. 1, 2021 to invest in broader tools and music services on Twitch,” read a tweet from the official account for “Twitch Sings.” The sudden announcement provided little in the way of explanation, and instead included a consolation update that Twitch would be releasing its entire backlog of more than 400 new songs to the game’s playlist, which at the time already exceeded 3,000 tracks. The game would cease to function by the new year.

Geritz, who goes by Gloopdawg on Twitch, was watching the “Twitch Sings” streamer known as Teenygiant when the news broke on Sept. 4, 2020. “I was devastated and angry,” Teenygiant said, recalling the moment that Geritz shared the news through the chat. “I’d finally found something I had happiness in and it was being ripped away.” Citing safety and privacy concerns around her current employment, Teenygiant declined to share her full name.

The news inspired Teenygiant to create a petition calling for Twitch to reconsider the closure, citing “Twitch Sings” as a source of comfort during the ongoing pandemic and subsequent closing of bars and other karaoke hot spots. The petition gained over 4,000 signatures in the first week. A Twitch spokesperson reached out but offered no new information beyond the official announcement.

Licensing fees and issues surrounding the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (commonly referred to as DMCA) are among the reasons blamed for the shutdown. In short, a paid license is needed for platforms to host music, which can get pricey. Streamers playing songs they don’t have the rights to on Twitch will often get hit by what’s known as a DMCA takedown, which forces them to remove the infringing content. Twitch recently struck a deal with the National Music Publishers’ Association, though that deal only sets up a new, more lenient process for flagged streamers to work with Twitch over copyright concerns. The licensing demands remain the same.

Around the time of the game’s closure, Twitch was undergoing a wave of DMCA takedown requests. As part of its announcement that “Twitch Sings” was shutting down, the streaming company explained that it would remove any archived broadcasts or saved highlights from the platform by Dec. 1, citing contractual obligations.

“In hindsight, maybe we got away with two years of being able to perform licensed music to our communities, at no cost to ourselves,” said Geritz. “It was a free game to play, you know. So maybe we got lucky.”

“Twitch Sings” was enthusiastically announced onstage during the TwitchCon 2018 keynote presentation; a closed beta followed shortly after. The premise was simple. Streamers would sing licensed songs to their audience as the words flashed across the screen. The audience interacted by throwing emotes onto the virtual stage, picking challenges like singing with your mouth shut or using a robotic voice, and voting on the next song. A party mode allowed multiple streamers to sing at the same time. The goal was to replicate the feeling of being at a concert or singing at a bar for a crowd of fans. The free-to-play game launched on April 13, 2019.

“Twitch Sings” also featured a duet mode where a streamer could pair up with a prerecorded video of another streamer as they sang their part of a song. This quickly became the hottest feature.

“I think that's the angle that ‘Twitch Sings’ wanted to have in the beginning,” said Geritz, referring to streamers singing solo. "[But] the game quickly became something opposite of that. It wasn't about the solo at all, it was about sharing an experience of a song with somebody, sharing music with each other. And that became a lot more powerful than the individual solo artists ever dreamed of being.”

For many, “Twitch Sings” was their on-ramp to live-streaming. “I started ‘Twitch Sings’ in October 2019, but it wasn’t until March 2020 that I started streaming,” said Victoria Martin, a streamer under the Gtg_Vicki handle who almost exclusively streamed “Twitch Sings” before its removal. “The community was so encouraging and supportive, that’s what really made me want to stream and interact with them all the more.”

Others saw “Twitch Sings” as a unique outlet to express their passions in ways that had not been possible on the platform before. “I went to TwitchCon in 2019 and I saw the ‘Twitch Sings’ booth and I said ‘This looks stupid. Why would anyone want to do karaoke online?’ ” said Micheal “Natiffan” Winson. A lifelong singer, Winson finally caved after repeated requests from followers to give “Twitch Sings” a try. “I had my [first ‘Twitch Sings’] stream Nov. 9, 2019. I remember the date because literally from that moment on, I streamed almost nothing else.”

“I only used to sing in the shower and the car before this,” Martin said. “We all had each other’s backs. If someone was having a bad day or was needing some support, we were all there to help.”

Teenygiant watched a friend sing confidently despite having trouble with the song. “It gave me the inspiration that maybe it didn’t matter about skill,” Teenygiant said. “Everyone in her chat was so supportive regardless of lack of vocal control.” Soon after, Teenygiant streamed her first time singing publicly. She would go on to regularly stream “Twitch Sings” five days out of the week.

The announcement of the end of “Twitch Sings” left fans with a little less than four months before the final curtain. Streamers, particularly those who built their channels on “Twitch Sings,” scrambled to find alternatives and make sense of what to do moving forward. Knowing an end was coming, viewer interest plummeted.

“I know a couple people that for two months could not watch Twitch because the second they saw Twitch, they thought of ‘Twitch Sings’ and would start crying,” said Winson. Others streamed tried as much as possible to make the most of their time, especially in the final month, December.

As the world prepared to toss 2020 to the curb, streamers booted up “Twitch Sings” one last time on Dec. 31 to give it a proper send-off. The final day was bittersweet. “I tried to do as much as I could to be a rock, to celebrate with everybody until they shut it down,” Geritz said on his final stream. Some streamers and viewers had already made peace with the closing and opted out of the final hurrah.

“I woke up expecting ‘Twitch Sings’ to be off, and it wasn’t,” Winson said when reflecting on his final stream on Jan. 1, 2021, shortly before Twitch finally pulled the plug. “I joined some people that were in a party, and we just started singing songs. The last four minutes, we sang ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic. My heart was so full watching the ‘Twitch Sings’ community coming together full strong, just thanking each other.” Similar scenes played out across Twitch.

Nowadays, these streamers are adapting to a post-“Twitch Sings” life. Martin now sits down with a new guest each week as she narrates a reading of the choose-your-own-adventure style of books in the Fighting Fantasy series. Teenygiant live-streams her process creating original music and otherwise streams a variety of games. Winson stopped streaming full time and has since retired from streaming altogether.

Although many put their focus elsewhere, some streamers are still in contact and brainstorming an alternative to “Twitch Sings.” Geritz makes use of video chat and conferencing tools like Discord to keep karaoke events going both on- and off-stream. And there’s hope for a more secure future as Twitch continues to develop partnerships with big publishers.

“Many of us have refused to scatter and start over,” Geritz said. “Instead we choose to continue embracing our love for singing popular music with each other and our communities and have no problem risking discipline on our channels to do so.”

Reminiscing on that final day, Winson said he “knew people that were on ‘Twitch Sings”’ for only a month, and they were in tears. And all they could say was ‘I wish I’d found this community earlier.’ ”