Mixtape's Licensed Soundtrack Justifies Lack of Streamer Mode

Headed into the month of May, the highest-rated game of 2026 on OpenCritic was Pokémon Pokopia. That changed today, the second Mixtape reviews went live. The upcoming coming-of-age game currently has an impressive 94 on OpenCritic at the time of writing, putting it 4 points higher than Pokopia.

We gave Mixtape a 10/10 in our review, giving it extremely high praise.

[Mixtape] is a wholly unique gaming experience that's loaded with nostalgic charm, great humor, and many poignant moments that will make you reframe how you think about your own personal memories of youth.

Naturally, with such high praise from critics, there's a lot of buzz leading into the game's release today. In 2026, that buzz means people are wondering if their favorite Twitch streamers and content creators will be streaming the game.

There's just one possible catch with that: Mixtape features a lot of copyrighted music. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know all too well that Twitch streams and YouTube videos do not get along with copyrighted music. As such, people were wondering whether or not Mixtape would see a Streamer Mode. It turns out that, no, there won't be, and for good reason.

The Music Is Too Essential To The Mixtape Experience

Developer Beethoven and Dinosaur put out a statement on social media today defending the reason for the lack of Streamer Mode for the game.

"Mixtape is about music," they said. "It's about Devo. It's about the Smashing Pumpkins, and Lush and Alice Coltrain. It's about how you feel when you listen to Iggy Pop." They continued, explaining that the music is a core part of the gameplay experience. If you take away the music, you take away everything that makes Mixtape special.

The levels are designed around the songs. We couldn't change the songs. We couldn't replace them.

It's something that makes total sense: if licensed music is essential to a game, then it cannot exist without it. It's similar to how essential something like The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" was to the first season of Stranger Things. If you remove it, there's less of an emotional impact from the story.

As our own Ethan Krieger said, the "soundtrack, full of real world, licensed music, really cannot be undersold in how pivotal it is to making Mixtape as special as it ends up." Removing something so pivotal would take away what makes Mixtape so great.