‘It’s like the gold rush’: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on Twitch.tv

Abstract

This paper explores the lives and careers of video game live broadcasters, especially those who gain their primary real-world income through this practice. We introduce the dominant market leader -the platform Twitch.tv -and outline its immensely rapid growth and the communities of millions of broadcasters, and tens of millions of viewers, it now boasts. Drawing on original interview data with professional and aspiring-professional game broadcasters ('streamers'), we examine the pasts, presents, and anticipated futures of streamers: how professional streamers began streaming, the everyday labour practices of streaming, and their concerns and hopes about the future of their chosen career. Through these examinations we explore the sociotechnical entanglements -digital intimacy, celebrity, content creation, and video gamesthat exemplify this new media form. Live-streaming is an online practice expanding in both production and consumption at immense speed, and Twitch and its streamers appear to be at the forefront of that revolution.

What You Post is What You Get: The Mediator Role of Reached Individuals in the Causal Relationship among Posted Content Types and Follower Counts on Facebook

“…Based on recent research in terms of user-attraction and interest on social media (Liu et al, 2014;Salganik et al, 2006;Venkatanathan et al, 2012;Wen & Lin, 2010), paired with contemporary trends in online gaming, particularly in the streaming platform of Twitch.tv (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019a, 2019bWoodcock & Johnson, 2019), the aim of the present was to discover user-attraction characteristics of different posted content on the Facebook brand page of a Hungarian Twitch.tv streamer, RandomNickname.…”

The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv

“…We have argued elsewhere that Twitch streaming has been shaped by a "neoliberal subjectivity" that depends on the entrepreneurship of the self, equating success as the result of hard work via the volume of hours streamed per week (Johnson and Woodcock, 2017), which will generate an inevitable emotional toll. Bowman grew his channel by streaming "a mind-crushing" twelve to sixteen hours a day, every day of the week, for two years straight: "this," he explained, "was the only way I could maintain growth."…”

Laboring Artists: Art Streaming on the Videogame Platform Twitch

“…Marino eventually gave up full time streaming because his health had declined so markedly from lack of exercise and work-related stress that he almost died. Yet others continue to work long hours streaming and a manta among Twitch partners is that in order to be profitable they must "always be streaming" [22].…”

“…Despite it being a site where the vast majority of streamers make no revenue from doing so, the majority of research on Twitch has focused on large and successful streamers, particularly those engaged in eSports and competitive multiplayer games [15,20,22,38]. Scholars have pointed to the extensive labor involved in creating a Twitch setup (PC, specialized software, webcams, greenscreens, microphones and often more) as well as the work involved in maintaining a "persona" while streaming, or at the least being entertaining and interacting with potential viewers, often for many hours at a stretch [8,22,38]. Different types of investigations of game streamers have also begun to emerge, but because Twitch bills itself as a way for individuals to make money while doing something they ostensibly enjoy, this framing was perhaps inevitable.…”