What does it take to be a Twitch streamer?
Playing video games to pay off your bills sounds like an ideal way to live life. The concept sounds so simple when you think about it.
Step 1: Stream yourself playing video games
Step 2: Gain followers
Step 3: Profit
Realistically, the knowledge that it takes to become a successful streamer is far more complex than one would generally think. I think the saying goes, “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” I myself have attempted streaming and ran into many complications along the way.
The first obstacle one has to consider is equipment. Do you have fast enough internet? Is your computer optimized for streaming and gaming simultaneously? What are frame rates and how do they affect gameplay and stream quality? There are a million questions like these that you have to face when preparing to stream. The problem I personally faced was the speed of my internet. When you buy your internet plan, you are given a certain amount of download speed and upload speed. As a gamer my only concern is for download speed, but as a streamer I found out that my upload speed was far to slow to stream at an acceptable quality. Of course the best streamers have the best equipment from microphones, cameras, computers, keyboards, mice, and even more. It is an environment where to succeed you most definitely have to spend (a lot of) money.
The second obstacle is building an audience. It’s almost implied that you need to have a unique outgoing personality to be successful on Twitch. The only exceptions I would say to this is if you are playing video games at a professional level or if you know a successful streamer and gain success by playing with them. But for those starting from the ground up, be ready to smile and exaggerate your emotions. Another problem you will run into is what I like to call the Twitch paradox. You might think you can play any game on Twitch because having fun and making money is the ideal situation. Unfortunately, the reality is that there are a handful of games that attract the majority of Twitch viewers. So the best way to get viewers is to stream a game that is extremely popular on Twitch. Unfortunately there are millions of other people also streaming the same game because of its popularity making it even harder to distinguish yourself from them. As you can see below, 7 of the top 10 games from October 2016 are still in the top 10 games on Twitch in February 2017.
The third obstacle one faces is commitment. Becoming a successful streamer takes full commitment of time and energy and its unrealistic for most people to just drop what they’re doing, quit their jobs and focus entirely on streaming. Almost all of the top streamers on Twitch have no other job or obligation other than streaming itself. Similar to Dominic Boyer’s representation of slotters, as a streamer you will find yourself in front of a screen every day for hours at a time. In fact a popular phenomenon on Twitch is the 24 hour stream. This is when a streamer decides to stream themselves for 24 hours without sleep. I intend to analyze these types of situations further to determine if a streamer (although not based in an office) could be classified as a screen worker according to Dominic Boyer or if creativity allows screen labor to be possible for Twitch streamers.
