They eat their young and grow antlers
Streamers are a bit of a strange lot, with their “Kappas”, raidings, and being sociable to strangers… I don’t really get it, and I’ve streamed for years. However, their mysterious world may have just been opened up, as Ted Lee from LogicHole has carried out a survey all about streaming and it’s pretty interesting stuff.
The key things to take away from Lee’s research is that there are three ‘stages’ of Streamer, each with their own challenges and hurdles to face while regularly streaming:
- New streamers tend to fight with their own technology – software, cameras, hardware etc. are all big hurdles to actually getting started. However, the aim of the game for new streamers is more to find friends and like-minded people rather than going in to it with the aim of it becoming a career or a big part of their life. Oh the innocence of youth, like a flower yet to bloom it gracefully fucks around with XSplit for half an hour.
- While the technological problems have more or less been ironed out, the ‘Adolescent streamer’ is like a moody teenager or an episode of Skins. They begin to face a lot of self-doubt and longing for a community, rather than simply doing it for the fun like newer streamers do.
- And now we’ve got the bitter, battle-hardened, gruff streamers sat in a dark corner of the bar: the ‘mature streamer’. Mature streamers are very much business and status: the business opportunities gained through streaming, and their standing within communities they longed for during the adolescent phase, have become big, important things in their streaming life.
Honestly I’m simplifying the results a lot, because there are some huge, data-filled write-ups about the survey. It’s definitely interesting to see just how this part of gaming, which is being seen more and more as ‘the future’, affects people over time.
More importantly though, soon we may learn the secrets behind the streamers’ power. We may finally devise a way to hold off against them until morning comes once again. And it will come soon, it must do. It’s been months. Hush, my children. Don’t listen to the scratching. It’s the streamers trying to get in again. Kappa, my darlings. Kappa.
Disclosure: I took part in the survey, so I had a tiny impact on how the final data looks.
