Is Being a Streamer All it’s Cracked Up to Be?

If you’re on this website, then chances are you love to play games. The odds are also good that you’ve spent some time watching professional streamers, earning great money to spend all day in their games of choice. It’s easy to idealize this lifestyle, where we could live by engaging with the hobby we love most, but is streaming as simple as the pros make it look?

Living a Persona

One part of being a streamer that many casual viewers overlook is that the person on the screen is rarely the same as how they act in real life. Most streamers adopt a streaming persona, often based on their actual personality traits but exaggerated significantly.

Even those streamers who stay close to their real personality can face challenges through the rise of parasocial relationships, where viewers feel a personal attachment and friendship despite having never met. This issue can cause problems with cyberbullying, necessitating a new set of accounts and practices, as mentioned in ExpressVPN’s article. Delaying posts to not tagging, filtering, and removing metadata adds another layer of complication to who a streamer is on a screen.

The Hobby and Job Divide

A famous quote states that you should “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”. As QuoteInvestigator states, the exact origin of this statement is unknown, but what is known is that reality is rarely so simple. After all, a witty saying proves nothing.

The truth is that most players use games to unwind, with irregular play sessions and various titles and genres that hold our interests. To be a streamer, you need to be able to take a completely different approach to gaming, sitting down for hours a day to play games in a way you usually never would. Even if you love gaming, this can kill the joy, turning something you used to look forward to into something you dread.

Behind the Scenes

Adding to the complications of being a streamer is that you only see a portion of what goes into the streaming process. Setting up an environment, editing videos, messing with equipment and sound levels, getting games to work, and making yourself presentable can be huge drains on time and energy.

Even after a long game session and right after a streamer wakes up, they need to consider balancing these complications and suiting their audience. That is the iceberg below the surface, which can add even more drain onto what is already a complicated pursuit.

Factor in how many streamers need to start while still working full time and how the gear can be expensive; as MakeUseOf explains, you can see the dream of streaming isn’t as simple as it first seems. Don’t get us wrong, for the right person willing to put in the work, streaming can be a fantastic and rewarding career, a literal dream come true, but those interested need to understand the truth. Nothing good comes easy, like everything in life, but early struggles can make eventual success all the sweeter.