Streamadelica

 

The curious world of live game streaming

Sounds unusual but stick with me, chatters, as I would say if I were a live streamer. We're travelling to  worlds occupied by ardent gamers for whom playing is just not enough! Whether it’s FIFA or Hearthstone or Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft or Careless Marjorie there is probably as big an audience watching people play as there are players. I may have made up one of those names! Or I’m just back from the future. There are a whole gaggle of game streamers who actually make a living from people watching them playing popular games. Its one of those jobs that just didn’t exist twenty years ago but how do they make any money and is it entertainment? 

 

The world of live game streaming is somewhere a lot of people never venture, even if you play, you may not wish to watch other people doing so yet there are enough that do to create massive audiences. Some of these streamers occupy roughly the same celebrity as prominent YouTubers did about a decade ago when vlogging was becoming hugely popular. Yet this is a different medium, for a start few of them go by their real names instead you'll find people with monikers such as Ninja, Quackity, Dream or Captain Sparklez. Some of them have built up millions of followers over a relatively short period of time. Live streaming itself though is older and there are examples of attempts to achieve what is now relatively easy as far back as 1993, two decades before Twitch existed. The technology was different and the player sat in front of a screen onto which the games were projected so this was a precursor to both vlogging and streaming. The first acknowledged use of what we now call live streaming was in 1995 when the RealNetworks company developed RealPlayer and streamed a baseball game live online.

Live streaming is unedited real time entertainment which can be a good or a bad thing. Vloggers edit scrupulously to cut out any errors, dull bits or material that otherwise might cause the post to lag. With live streaming you see it all as it unfolds so this can be exciting game play or it can be someone wittering on about the shape of courgettes. The gameplay itself takes up the majority of the screen with streamers themselves usually seen in an inset box. You watch it all unfold live so streams can go on for an hour or two hours or, in the case of subathons where donations keep the stream going, potentially days. It does add an advantage for the viewer because you can take part beyond merely commenting after the fact below. Here you can comment in real time like on social media and the streamer will interact with the `chatters` as they are often called.  The latters' comment scroll up the screen constantly to they can comment, ask questions and so on. This creates a sense of community. 

What surprised me quite quickly is how many less confident or socially awkward people are active in this world; on well known streamer even wears a mask due to his own anxiety over his appearance. A number of times I heard or read people calling it a `safe space` and this was not quite what I'd expected at all. Popular media tends to focus on violent games and while there is conflict in some of the clips I saw it is played with a levity a long way removed from the cliched image of aggressive gaming.

Last year the PC Mag site listed the the best live game streaming services as Twitch.tv, Caffeine, Facebook Gaming and Owncas though there are loads of them. The activity originated in the US in the mid 2010s and has expanded ever since. Live game streaming is a full time occupation for those who can manage to make it so by expanding their subscribers which is possible. Some of the top UK streamers started four or five years ago with about 20 subscribers and now have millions. 

The Twitch screen- there's a lot to take in...

To try and discover how people make money from this I looked at Twitch the best known streaming platform which was launched in 2011 and which has several methods of monetization. Users can subscribe to a creator and streamers earn 50%. Or there are Twitch Bits which are tipped to streamers in the online chat. Donations can also be made to a streamer usually via Paypal. Unlike vloggers who rely a lot on adverts or sponsors for revenue, streamers make little money from adverts because people would never notice them while watching  - I’m not even sure where they would fit on the screen! Inevitably people ask how much money a Twitch streamer makes and there are multiple sources of information to tell you who the top ones are. Of course, this alters by the day. The latest estimate I could find was that a successful streamer might make between £3K to £5K per month though the most famous ones make considerably more.

Someone who goes by the name Ninja is presently believed to be the world’s most popular game streamer on Twitch with over eighteen million followers and you may be surprised to discover in this apparently teen orientated world that he is actually thirty one. That doesn’t however exclude him from the archetypal melodramatic gesture when last year he quit streaming and social media…for one week. There are quite a number of female games streamers too, the most popular right now is Pokimane who has about nine million followers. 

Drilling down further to see how it all comes together I checked out an enclave of Minecraft Twitch streamers based in the UK. These are all full time gamers who have become well known in their world and indeed are recognized in public when out and about. They all know each other and often appear in streams together. Handily some of them have put edited excerpts from their live streams on YouTube because as a non gamer I’m not sure I could sit through hours of Minecraft! To someone not acquainted with the game, first launched in 2011, looks very blocky and sort of old fashioned, more like the way I remember video games of the past but I’m told it is absorbing. The play is dazzlingly fast and I'm just not trained to follow it and certainly could not play it. Still I quite enjoyed some of the banter. Just as YouTubers evolved beyond the channel into physical media, live shows and even professional broadcasting, so these streamers have actually ventured outside to make vlog style clips of escapades galore from chasing around their former school to trying to sail a boat or even on trips abroad (not on the boat!). There are even tentative live shows which have the aura of a pop concert crossed with a village fete. Unlike the slick gameplay, the live shows need more work as I'm not sure chair swimming is going to become a big thing any time soon.

As famous people in any walk of life discover creative work combined with a certain celebrity brings pressures of a particular kind. The plethora of `I’m leaving YouTube` videos and the number of high profile vloggers that have disappeared is testament to the toll something seemingly so fun can take on people’s mental health. Like footballers, this is not a career that will last a working lifetime of forty plus years. Its not just that the streamers themselves will age but so will their current audience. Constantly having to come up with ideas, keep up with others while attempting to have some sort of a life is a busy commitment. 

The most lighthearted acknowledgement I’ve seen of all this comes in a song that rather neatly sums up the whole live game streaming experience made by one of the Minecraft Twitch streamers a couple of years ago called `Life By the Sea`.  I have to say it was rather good to find a song amongst all the messing about and gaming, at least something a bit more relatable to outsiders. Tubbo- real name Toby Smith – is one of a batch of Twitch streamers based in the South of England usually playing Minecraft and back in 2021 collaborated with American songwriter Charlie Green, known as CG5, with some songs he wanted his own to sound like and some basic ideas. 

Over several sessions, all done remotely, (this was pandemic time of course)  the song was shaped with the addition of British writer Dan Bull who provided reams of draft lyrics from which some of the best were chosen and adapted. He definitely brings a class including an exceptional line that goes “Teardrops, we've made friends between screens, And deep seas, steal hearts while teens scream our ears off " .  I saw a making of video which shows how the music is constructed using sampled sounds. Not long ago I’d watched an old clip of basically this same process undertaken forty years ago by the likes of Peter Gabriel which he called “found sounds” where he had to go outside and record metal pipes and things but which is now readily available in software to download if you’re planning your own song. Shows just how much technology moves on.

While superficially a jaunty ditty `Life by the Sea` also reflects the pressures of “the trending tab”. The result is very British rap over a barroom piano, beats that are not too harsh and some interesting wordplay. The lyrics take a slightly reflective angle being about how sometimes the job is pressured even if it looks like they’re having constant fun while it also acknowledges the positive side – “playing games, taking pain straight away”. Ultimately it is optimistic as he is “living and loving life by the sea”. Because he lives on the South Coast you see. My personal favourite line goes “I’m just a happy guy paddling through the angry tide”.  There's also a video in which Tubbo steadfastly declines to properly lip sync and invents a new way to walk down steps. To date the video has eighteen million views and just as many streams on Spotify. The whole package is good hearted, fun and as they would no doubt say based. A bit like live game streaming itself.