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Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

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Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#271

Post by nybblesio »

I stream my daily programming routine on Twitch. The key, for me, is exactly this: it's my routine. I don't tailor my routine for Twitch, beyond interacting with my audience.

With that said, since starting at the beginning of 2018, I've done better than I expected. I have 1300+ followers on Twitch with decent monthly growth. My daily average viewership numbers are hovering around 40. The first month was an imposition while I fought with the mechanics of running a stream and programming. Now I don't even notice. I talk to myself regardless, so I figured I might as well entertain some folks while I do it. :)

I will never make any real money streaming. I knew that going in. But I am meeting a lot of nice people and the old man in me wants to help the youngsters. If I can save one person a few hassles on their journey, it's worth it.

Finally, I find YouTube a much harder nut to crack. My channel has seen slow and consistent growth, but slow is the operative word here. Very, very slow. Long form content does not seem to do well. For YouTube, videos <= 15min appears to be the sweet spot.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#272

Post by ryandrake »

cybwraith wrote: post #243
alexgmcm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days? Hasn't that always been the case? It's just that when we were kids etc. we had more free time. The Nintendo Switch has an excellent selection of more 'casual' games. Super Mario Odyssey reminded me a lot of the games I played as a kid.

I would say not really. For one thing, the early days of gaming held onto many elements from arcades where games were meant to be consumed in somewhat bite-sized chunks (Atari, NES, etc). A big factor for multiplayer games is the somewhat modern obsession with matchmaking and character intro/pick screens. When I was a kid, I could hop into a game immediately for a 15-20 minute deathmatch session of Quake 1/2/3 in any…

> Quake Chanpions

Don’t forget the 2-3 minutes it seems to take to even load the game. QC would be so much better if you could just load it (quickly) hop onto an already-playing game, and skip all the intros and statistics. How did a franchise like Quake backslide so badly?

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#273

Post by flashman »

KirinDave wrote: post #232

Having spent literally hundreds of hours producing video game content for youtube and twitch, I can say this: It's an incredibly sad, discouraging experience even if you get traction (and I got some traction). It's also utterly hollow: your entire existence is as a wrapper around the content folks actually want to see. The most successful streamers develop their own brand, but these people are the 0.5%, the Felixs an…

> your entire existence is as a wrapper around the content folks actually want to see

Yeah, what sets popular streamers apart is that their 'wrapper' is distinctive and entertaining in its own right. Everyone is showing much the same product; what can you put around it that's different?

Kind of like selling fizzy drinks, I guess.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#274

Post by nbm »

keithnz wrote: post #252
rezashirazian wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality is poor. It's mostly gamer streamers trying out something different. They're usually going through a udacity course or hacking a crud web application. There is lot of blindly looking at the screen, reading tutorials or getting frustrated with compilation errors. They do not like to be helped.

I think this is an unfair characterization, there are some REALLY good programmers, some new programmers, and people at all stages of their programming journey. A lot are doing game programming, I'm less interested in this, but some are very interesting. For instance... https://www.twitch.tv/jessicamak Really interesting what she does, and an insane attention to detail. A HNer I watch when he codes... he does an inte…

I was basically introduced to Twitch by Handmade Hero, and Casey (the host) seems to have brought a bunch of his contemporaries in as well.

Handmade Hero:

Complete game from scratch (nothing but platform libraries). Has spawned a number of small projects, like 4coder (https://4coder.itch.io/4coder) and Milton (https://github.com/serge-rgb/milton) and a lot more: http://handmade.network/

https://handmadehero.org/

Bitwise:

Complete hardware/software stack for a RISC-V computer from scratch (compiler, assembler, ...)

https://github.com/pervognsen/bitwise

Sean Barrett:

He's the author of the excellent stb header-only libraries, does the occasional live coding video.

https://www.twitch.tv/nothings2 https://www.youtube.com/user/silverspaceship/videos

Jonathan Blow:

He's the game developer and designer behind Braid and The Witness. He's designing a programming language (JAI), works on that and shows off features, as well as doing game development, on his channel. (And occasionally playing games.)

https://www.twitch.tv/naysayer88 with no schedule VODs: https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888/videos

Martin "quill18" Glaude:

He's primarily a game streamer, but also a consistent Ludum Dare participant, with some high placement in many of them. He has a series of programming videos.

https://www.twitch.tv/quill18 Vods: https://www.youtube.com/user/quill18creates/videos

They have different approaches, but mostly ignore the chat during the stream, but often the chat has very bright folks who can help out.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#275

Post by gitgud »

nybblesio wrote: post #271

I stream my daily programming routine on Twitch. The key, for me, is exactly this: it's my routine. I don't tailor my routine for Twitch, beyond interacting with my audience. With that said, since starting at the beginning of 2018, I've done better than I expected. I have 1300+ followers on Twitch with decent monthly growth. My daily average viewership numbers are hovering around 40. The first month was an imposition…

What kind of programming do you stream? Is it tutorials or work related?

I would always be worried that someone would catch a glimpse of a private key or API secret, how do you deal with that?

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#276

Post by bigger_cheese »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #237
mlinsey wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch Twitch because I grew up playing lots of video games and now watching is less of a time commitment then playing the games. Streamers aren't meant to be consumed by watching them every day for hours on end. I mean, I'm sure there are core fans who do that, probably students and single young professionals like you say, but my use case for Twitch is "hey, I have 10-20 minutes free; not even enough time for a ful…

This BAFFLED ME for years as well. But I think I've finally figured it out. A lot of people are watching these streams AS THEY GAME. I can devote 75% of my attention to one monitor as a play "League of Legends", and listen to some helpful coaching from a Twitch Stream with 25% of my attention in the other monitor. At times when my game is loading, or my character is dead and I'm waiting to respawn I can even devote 1…

That's how I watch. When I'm playing an MMO or similar I have Twitch (or Netflix, or Youtube videos) playing on my second monitor. It's no different than having tv or radio on in background while you cook dinner or similar.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#277

Post by Vektorweg »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

I watch streams to socialize, thanks to the chat function. I usually don't care much about the game they play and I only watch streams with less than 30 viewers.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#278

Post by nybblesio »

gitgud wrote: post #275
nybblesio wrote: post #271

I stream my daily programming routine on Twitch. The key, for me, is exactly this: it's my routine. I don't tailor my routine for Twitch, beyond interacting with my audience. With that said, since starting at the beginning of 2018, I've done better than I expected. I have 1300+ followers on Twitch with decent monthly growth. My daily average viewership numbers are hovering around 40. The first month was an imposition…

What kind of programming do you stream? Is it tutorials or work related? I would always be worried that someone would catch a glimpse of a private key or API secret, how do you deal with that?

I like to work on low-level projects. I've streamed x86 and ARM64 assembly language, C and C++, and Rust projects.

At the moment, I'm working on a compiler for a programming language I call Basecode.

With one exception -- that I had to terminate for other reasons -- I stream only open source projects that I have complete ownership over. I don't typically have to worry about exposing keys or passwords.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#279

Post by gitgud »

leviathant wrote: post #62
SurrealSoul wrote: post #36

I personally know Markipler (youtube, 23M+) as well as follow some other people here and there. There is a youtuber; BloominBanana I subbed around the same time I subbed to Markipler 2010ish, they both do (did?) the same horror gameplay except Bloomin' has about 12 subs on youtube. Mark as I knew him was the king of 'going out there' he was never afraid of marketing, publicity stunts and was honestly humble to his hu…

Yeah. Speaking as someone who ran a rather large fansite about NIN in the 2000s (the entity now basically exists as a Twitter account), you really cannot just "grow organically" on today's internet. I like to tell people I have a marketing allergy. Self-promotion feels gross. The "if you build it, they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams is not applicable to a world where so much more content is being created than…

> The "if you build it, they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams is not applicable to a world where so much more content is being created than can possibly be consumed.

This resonates with me deeply. I've always lived by that sentiment.

It's also one of the reasons I love the points systems on Reddit and Hacker News, as it's the fairest way to objectively rank things people make, rather than by how much advertising and marketing they can afford.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#280

Post by mgr86 »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #231
mgr86 wrote: post #227

I'll share my personal use of twitch streams. I really enjoy AOE2. The game might be nearing its second decade, but its very enjoyable for me to watch personally. I will use youtube-dl to grab past broadcasts and play the games back at 1.5x to 2x speed. I can easily skip through parts I find uninteresting. I'll generally watch one or two games per day, but my time commitment is under 30mins.

Are they playing against other humans? I got AOE2 HD a couple months ago and it's been my go-to game this summer. But I haven't thought of looking on twitch or for multiplayer online.

Yes, there is quite the competitive scene. And many streamers on twitch. However, most of the competitive games are played on Voobly. There are guides out there about playing AOE2HD on Voobly.

There is a 60k tournament underway. Tiny compared to other games, but respectable considering the age of this game.

The game's audience is mainly international. Large player bases in china, Vietnam, EU, and south america. The community can mainly be found at aoezone.net. There is a smaller community also on reddit.com/r/aoe2

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