Twitch.tv
- Thread starter Mick
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Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 10,248
- 7,595
He makes it pretty easy for people to know where he's at. Yeah sometimes it's not hard to figure out, but he's gone out of his to let people know where he is at.
Before he boarded the plane he made sure to show what gate and everything he was at. He wants that stuff to happen to him because he gets free press elsewhere because of it and Twitch finally said enough.
This happened at some Denny's in NYC about a month ago.
Before he boarded the plane he made sure to show what gate and everything he was at. He wants that stuff to happen to him because he gets free press elsewhere because of it and Twitch finally said enough.
This happened at some Denny's in NYC about a month ago.
Xevy
Log Wizard
- 8,603
- 3,816
That's my biggest fear if I were a successful streamer. Fucking neckbeards and kids that do shit like SWAT streamers. I mean it wouldn't freak me out, but what if they come in and my dog starts some shit and they shot it? That's the nightmare. It sucks for those of us who have been around the interwebs for decades so we can't really truly have anonymity if we needed it. There's fucking e-trails with our full names back to Halo 1 LAN tournaments when we were 14 and shit.
KCXIV
Molten Core Raider
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- 180
Streamers need to go to their local pd and tell them about shit like that might happen at so and so address. Get ahead of that shit.
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Balroc
Molten Core Raider
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- 229
Why good riddance? Ice's stream is not really my thing but I did tune in once to him inviting some street performer up his place and he opened up his twitch donations to the artist for a couple hours or some thing. The dude made 100's of dollars and got some exposure which was pretty cool. His audience is pure aids though.
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He streams in a manner which goes beyond reasonable levels of protecting yourself and those around you. It's the kind of shit that puts people in danger because people are dumb, and do things they think are funny, but are actually dangerous and expensive. I think things like this have real potential to cause serious issues for Twitch
Derkon
Trakanon Raider
- 2,452
- 1,192
This. I don't mind guys that do similar stuff like Reckful or that Andy whatever guy, Ice just seems like that type of person that carries trouble with him. I am not too familiar with his audience but it seems mostly awful.
Balroc
Molten Core Raider
- 1,064
- 229
All right, yeah. I did briefly watch one of his videos before he boards the plane and he tells his stream which gate he's at. What a goofball.
Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 10,248
- 7,595
Ice challenges his audience to do stupid shit to him. He needed to go, but I'm sure he'll be back.
Ice calls out and talks shit about a actuall Crips gang thats 20 minutes way
Ice calls out and talks shit about a actuall Crips gang thats 20 minutes way
Alright. So people were curious about Twitch streaming, and I got summoned by the abyss from Chysamere. So I'll do a quick write up on Twitch streaming from my experience.
IMO - Being a successful Twitch streamer is both easier and harder than people realize. There's a few things you need to do and a few things you need to know before starting -
1.) You must have a unique hook to draw people to watching you. For most success stories, this is excelling in a popular game for your first game. You don't need to be the best player in the game, but you need to be in the top 0.1% of players for your first game. There are exceptions to this (ie: Popular YouTuber, Caster, etc), but in general this is the foot in the door part and basic requirement for starting a stream.
2.) You must dedicate 8 hours a day minimum, with 12 hours a day preferred. Consistency is the key to a good Twitch stream. I would say if you're not averaging 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, you're going to find it difficult to really start building a viewer base and getting traction. Throw away any dreams you have of only streaming 3 hours a day 5 days a week and getting a following, because that shit is simply not happening.
3.) Investing in a good setup matters - Get a good two stream PC setup that can do 1080p / 60 with medium encoding at 6k bitrate. Get a microphone that doesn't sound like shit. Webcams are surprisingly optional if you offer a good personality, but audio and video quality are not. Streaming requires spending hundreds of hours with little financial gain at all in the beginning - don't fuck yourself over by being a cheap ass and devaluing your time because you didn't make your stream look good.
4.) Be prepared to live off of either money that you've saved or the assistance of family for your first 8 to 12 months. Even working hard every day, it's going to take awhile to build a stream that can financially support you.
5.) Don't be a salty piece of shit TOWARDS OTHER PEOPLE. Getting salty at hearthstone for RNG fucking you? That's fine. Being in a team game and calling your teammate a shitter? That's bad. While some streamers get away with this, you are going to inherently reduce your appeal and thus final amount of money you can bring in if you don't treat other players with respect. Streamers like LIRIK and Seagull should be your model here. Admittedly, once you get to the 20k+ level, you can mix in more salt than expected (ie: Summit) because you're somewhat invincible at that point. However if you try it while climbing you'll likely fall to your death.
6.) Expect to be lonely - This might seem bizarre and counter factual, but I'll tell you from experience that it's true. You are putting on a presentation when you stream - you're not just hanging out with buddies. Which means you're in show mode for 9 to 10 hours every day. This leaves you with far less time to socialize and bullshit than almost any other job imaginable. There is no downtime, and if you take a long break midstream you might as well end the stream. This effect can take it's toll over 2 years.
There's probably other important stuff here that I could bring up, but I'd say what I've written is a decent primer. Even though it carries different stresses in terms of politics, I've been happy with my choice to focus on broadcasting over streaming. I try not to think about things like how much money MoonMoon makes a month (hint: 50k+ or more) which is certainly more than what I'd make even with the largest broadcasting gigs. However, I've had social opportunities and free time that I never would have had if I stuck with the streaming formula that gave me a successful stream. The best advice I can give anyone going into it though is, don't think that you're just playing video games for money - it's a job, and it comes with it's ups and downs just like any other.
IMO - Being a successful Twitch streamer is both easier and harder than people realize. There's a few things you need to do and a few things you need to know before starting -
1.) You must have a unique hook to draw people to watching you. For most success stories, this is excelling in a popular game for your first game. You don't need to be the best player in the game, but you need to be in the top 0.1% of players for your first game. There are exceptions to this (ie: Popular YouTuber, Caster, etc), but in general this is the foot in the door part and basic requirement for starting a stream.
2.) You must dedicate 8 hours a day minimum, with 12 hours a day preferred. Consistency is the key to a good Twitch stream. I would say if you're not averaging 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, you're going to find it difficult to really start building a viewer base and getting traction. Throw away any dreams you have of only streaming 3 hours a day 5 days a week and getting a following, because that shit is simply not happening.
3.) Investing in a good setup matters - Get a good two stream PC setup that can do 1080p / 60 with medium encoding at 6k bitrate. Get a microphone that doesn't sound like shit. Webcams are surprisingly optional if you offer a good personality, but audio and video quality are not. Streaming requires spending hundreds of hours with little financial gain at all in the beginning - don't fuck yourself over by being a cheap ass and devaluing your time because you didn't make your stream look good.
4.) Be prepared to live off of either money that you've saved or the assistance of family for your first 8 to 12 months. Even working hard every day, it's going to take awhile to build a stream that can financially support you.
5.) Don't be a salty piece of shit TOWARDS OTHER PEOPLE. Getting salty at hearthstone for RNG fucking you? That's fine. Being in a team game and calling your teammate a shitter? That's bad. While some streamers get away with this, you are going to inherently reduce your appeal and thus final amount of money you can bring in if you don't treat other players with respect. Streamers like LIRIK and Seagull should be your model here. Admittedly, once you get to the 20k+ level, you can mix in more salt than expected (ie: Summit) because you're somewhat invincible at that point. However if you try it while climbing you'll likely fall to your death.
6.) Expect to be lonely - This might seem bizarre and counter factual, but I'll tell you from experience that it's true. You are putting on a presentation when you stream - you're not just hanging out with buddies. Which means you're in show mode for 9 to 10 hours every day. This leaves you with far less time to socialize and bullshit than almost any other job imaginable. There is no downtime, and if you take a long break midstream you might as well end the stream. This effect can take it's toll over 2 years.
There's probably other important stuff here that I could bring up, but I'd say what I've written is a decent primer. Even though it carries different stresses in terms of politics, I've been happy with my choice to focus on broadcasting over streaming. I try not to think about things like how much money MoonMoon makes a month (hint: 50k+ or more) which is certainly more than what I'd make even with the largest broadcasting gigs. However, I've had social opportunities and free time that I never would have had if I stuck with the streaming formula that gave me a successful stream. The best advice I can give anyone going into it though is, don't think that you're just playing video games for money - it's a job, and it comes with it's ups and downs just like any other.
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This is not true. Your big streamers are taking home a 70/30 split on ads with Twitch (or better) and 3.75 per sub. 50/50 is the baseline partner agreement, and bigger organizations and streamers have way more leverage than that.
- 2
Glad you've enjoyed the casts! And yeah, I've lurked and posted on FoH / Rerolled for over a decade now. Going back to 2004 in the WoW beta era
Leadsalad
Cis-XYite-Nationalist
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Byr
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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If i had to guess twitch is worried about liability issues he could cause. I mean hes putting people in danger sharing where he is so his viewers will do stupid shit to him. How exposed is twitch if something serious happens? There probably isnt a lot of precedent in this space.
spronk
FPS noob
- 22,602
- 25,653
I hope the new UI they are rolling out is simply buggy and they aren't cutting features, I just don't like that bar at the top always up there, and about 1/2 the time the left side isn't showing me who I have followed so finding channels to watch has suddenly gotten exponentially more click-y, having to browse through stuff etc.
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On ZP's thing, I would add that you probably need to start streaming on a new game in most cases too, unless you're already insanely good. From what I've seen, new popular streamers on established games like lol/dota/hearthstone/csgo etc are very few and far between unless they're pros/semi pros who start streaming. Realistically, most people who want to watch streams for these games are already watching one of the many popular streamers and you probably won't be able to get big numbers.
As far as I know ZP started the real streaming thing with HotS, when it was in beta, although I could be wrong. There were few streamers then, like a bunch of known streamers streamed the game for a few days when they got invited(the usual suspects you see in basically every new game the first few days before they go back to their main games) but after these were gones, not many remained so it's a lot easier to compete in that type of game. Once you're more established you can probably move around more, or move to the next similar type of game that your audience will probably like(HotS > Overwatch, while different genre, stays within the Blizzard sphere which a lot of people stick to for example, or H1Z1 to Playerunknown to whatever the next zombie survival multiplayer fps is and so on).
There are exceptions though I guess. Like if you stream lol or dota and you're pro at some weird ass champion/hero that not many ppl play/have stupidly high rating(challenger in LoL? 8k+ in dota) you might be able to build a viewerbase but otherwise unless you have really nice tits it isn't happening.
Very isnightful post and the "no break" is really where the "easy job" image falls apart, playing video games all day with only like 2-3 10mins break to eat is definitely not something that easy. I mean you can do it every now and then when you're poopsocking a new mmo or whatever but doing it for weeks/months is probably quite taxing. Especially when you have to mostly stick to one single game the entire time since your audience is there for that game, not for any other game you might want to play at the time.
As far as I know ZP started the real streaming thing with HotS, when it was in beta, although I could be wrong. There were few streamers then, like a bunch of known streamers streamed the game for a few days when they got invited(the usual suspects you see in basically every new game the first few days before they go back to their main games) but after these were gones, not many remained so it's a lot easier to compete in that type of game. Once you're more established you can probably move around more, or move to the next similar type of game that your audience will probably like(HotS > Overwatch, while different genre, stays within the Blizzard sphere which a lot of people stick to for example, or H1Z1 to Playerunknown to whatever the next zombie survival multiplayer fps is and so on).
There are exceptions though I guess. Like if you stream lol or dota and you're pro at some weird ass champion/hero that not many ppl play/have stupidly high rating(challenger in LoL? 8k+ in dota) you might be able to build a viewerbase but otherwise unless you have really nice tits it isn't happening.
Very isnightful post and the "no break" is really where the "easy job" image falls apart, playing video games all day with only like 2-3 10mins break to eat is definitely not something that easy. I mean you can do it every now and then when you're poopsocking a new mmo or whatever but doing it for weeks/months is probably quite taxing. Especially when you have to mostly stick to one single game the entire time since your audience is there for that game, not for any other game you might want to play at the time.