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Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

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Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#161

Post by vkou »

kzrdude wrote: post #55
belval wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions that Tyler makes $300k per year in merchandise alone (so excluding any actual sponsored content). Frankly I don't get why this can't be seen as a legitimate very successful business. Where is the line? Is entertainment only valid on TV? YouTube? Some commenters here even said that it's all good now but that it won't work in his thirties or something as if there aren't a ton of jobs out there that…

Not a real job is a quite good stance to take. Because there is an absurd power law at play here, the absolute top make a lot of money. In a "real job" you are paid a living wage, on twitch you are paid scraps if you don't make it to the top.

Twitch does follow a power law, but from the leaks, I was surprised as to how many people are making high-five figures/year from it.

But no, it's not a 'career' I'd recommend to anyone. The net expected value of becoming a local theatre actor is significantly better than Twitch...

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#162

Post by dathinab »

jeffchien wrote: post #99
npinsker wrote: post #35

This reads as very biased and judgmental. It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice. It honestly makes me wonder if the author is jealous of the subject. It seems like the piece is really reaching to make Tyler's life appear as irresponsible as possible. Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives…

I think it's possible to both respect how they got there and their agency, but also feel some mixed feelings about their lifestyles. Especially if you see tyler1 and xqc do 8+/10+ hour streams every day respectively, while taking 1-2 vacations per year. "Pity" might be too judgemental, but I personally don't envy that lifestyle. It's just like respecting boxers' and NFL players' success, while not wanting to be in th…

> 8+/10+ hour streams every day respectively, while taking 1-2 vacations per year.

Sounds like the live of very many self-employed people.

Like even if you just have a small shop going with 10h a day 6 days a week without vacation for many years isn't that rare of a story to hear.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#163

Post by aidenn0 »

megablast wrote: post #145
aidenn0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad worked for startups on-and-off and he definitely was productive for a lot more than 8 hours per day. He does agree that for truly novel work there's a limit, but for every novel problem to solve, there's dozens[1] of reported bugs to investigate, so there's plenty of work to fit between work on new things. 1: That number seems small today, but I got the sense that bug-discovery by customers at least was limite…

You are talking for your dad?? What??

He has far more experience working 60+ hour weeks then I do, so I defer to his wisdom in this case.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#164

Post by seabird »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #116
colinmhayes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a world of difference between playing league casually and competitively. No one at his level of play can autopilot through a game and still win.

That's not true. The skill disparity between the very top players (100-500), and the rest of the players in the top league is usually very large.

He IS a very top player (solo Challenger, top 200 in 4/5 roles in the game). There's not a chance in hell he's able to go on autopilot at that point, even in slightly lower rank games during his grinds where he has to try and win losing games with a team that's not good enough to help him do it. The only reason he's not playing as a salaried professional is that he's in a bad region to do so and makes more being a personality.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#165

Post by azirbel »

What I found most interesting:

> His latest Twitch deal includes a performance quota; he streams 200 hours a month.

50 hours a week of on-stream time! And any other business/branding/merchandizing must happen on top of those 50 hours where he already has to be 100% on. It does sound exhausting.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#166

Post by ZephyrBlu »

1_player wrote: post #154
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. The skill disparity between the very top players (100-500), and the rest of the players in the top league is usually very large.

The point of match-making is playing with people your same level. It doesn't matter what level tyler1 is, he'll be playing against people that will challenge and give him a hard time. You're not matched against people less skilled than you where you can just "relax" and walk it in. When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there.

> When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there

Top players hit the ceiling of the MMR system before they hit their skill ceiling.

When you get to the very top of a ladder, matchmaking stops working correctly. Partly because the top few players are insanely good compared to everyone else and partly because there are literally not enough people online at any one time for an equal match to be made.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#167

Post by slightwinder »

lhorie wrote: post #93
dvt wrote: post #46

Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since…

> Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities. The only thing that arguably changed is that content production is so cheap and saturated now that consumers get a lot more choice in terms of who they want to watch, without being constrained by TV schedules and other distribution/logistics limitations. There is no "…

> I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities.

Yes and no. They are celebs, but definitely a new style of celebs. They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill. They could be your neighbor or the dude next to you in a supermarket, and you wouldn't know. Furthermore, they are millionaire working from home, growing from home, with average equipment and average products. This is something which never happened before, not at this scale.

Though, to be fair, there are also some actual skilled people growing into this space and celebs from other areas are breaking in too.

> There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella,

Yes, obviously. But the type and quality is completely different to established entertainment. It started with people with the bare minimum of entertaining-skill who established this. People who wouldn't have been able to succeed in the classical entertainment-industry. And this absolutely is a change. For the industry itself, it also is a change, because those people are cheaper and have a different angle to play at. This is more on the quality-level of a tupperware-party that somehow went up to a global scale.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#168

Post by dathinab »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #110
npinsker wrote: post #35

This reads as very biased and judgmental. It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice. It honestly makes me wonder if the author is jealous of the subject. It seems like the piece is really reaching to make Tyler's life appear as irresponsible as possible. Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives…

I don't think this article is that biased. This kind of lifestyle is pretty common for top streamers, and I'd argue it's about far more than just not knowing how to run their lives.

It's actually a lifestyle common for many self employed people, not just streamers.

But also e.g. startup entrepreneurs.

Or people with a small one-person shop.

or even the movie industry, everyone from the industry I have spoken with agreed on the lifestyle many involved peoples is so bad that many end up needing drugs to goo on sooner or later.

But I tend to linger on twitch and there are many streamers which might just earn comparable to a slightly better employee job, but which have a much more healthy life style. Like streaming with a (somewhat) stable schedule, <=5 days a week. Taking holidays and not streaming too long. Through platforms like Twitch, YouTube and especially TickTock make taking holidays REALLY hard. And it's really not easy to get right.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#169

Post by the_lonely_road »

solidasparagus wrote: post #125
Permit wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you played League of Legends or Dota 2 before? It will be hard to convey the mental/emotional exhaustion that most people feel from playing MOBAs at even a semi-competitive level. In my experience it's a lot different than playing FPS or other games. I have a distinct memory of finishing a game of Dota 2 and realizing that it felt as though I'd just finished a 3 hour exam. I didn't feel happy that we'd won, just…

Playing MOBAs all day is much easier than programming all day. It has bigger lows like exhausting 100 minute techie games or getting tilted by teammates, but it's still somehow easier. I think it's because you get a fresh start every game and a good game is refreshing in a way that finishing a problem isn't.

Sometimes grandmaster but frequently diamond player here that also built my own company where I frequently coded 12+ hours a day. I disagree with you completely. I was also significantly more exhausted from a long session of league then I was from a long session of developing one of my sites. You are always on for 30 minutes straight and near the end it’s almost non stop team fighting and positioning with micro decisions being made every few seconds versus coding where my mind will wander until I snap it back to focus.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#170

Post by ZephyrBlu »

seabird wrote: post #164
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. The skill disparity between the very top players (100-500), and the rest of the players in the top league is usually very large.

He IS a very top player (solo Challenger, top 200 in 4/5 roles in the game). There's not a chance in hell he's able to go on autopilot at that point, even in slightly lower rank games during his grinds where he has to try and win losing games with a team that's not good enough to help him do it. The only reason he's not playing as a salaried professional is that he's in a bad region to do so and makes more being a pe…

That is my point. You don't think he could autopilot and still win majority of his games while climbing from Diamond to Challenger?

> where he has to try and win losing games with a team that's not good enough to help him do it

This doesn't mean he can't autopilot. Attempting to solo carry a team of 5 is difficult even if you're completely dialed in.

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