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 at 26, and plenty decide to completely change their lives at ages far older than that. Tyler seems like an admirable rags-to-riches success story -- he didn't get his foot in the door by being in the right location or knowing the right people, just hard work and a ton of talent. The company that runs the game he plays banned him for life, and he persevered anyway. In many ways, his success is more rare and more difficult than starting a startup. I'm not saying the lifestyle is necessarily worth celebrating, but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
> 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.
Interesting. I did not read it like that at all. Do you have an example quotation of what makes you think that?
The impression I got is both Tyler and Micayla are well aware of how negatively streaming affects their lives. They both explicitly said they don't want to be doing this forever and want to retire, didn't they?
I also didn't get the impression at all that they're kids; quite the opposite. They have golden handcuffs, just like a lot of people in tech. The difference seems to be (and this is what I felt the article conveyed, at least to me) the grueling effect of having your life and brain on display around the clock.
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 their shoes and risk getting killed in the ring or CTE.
> Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives at 26
I mean take a look at the movie artist, musician field and see how many people there have problems running their live.
Having the skills to run your live, is a separate skill set. And the more stress and irregularities you job entails the harder it is. Hence why e.g. successful actors often have people helping them managing their lives.
> but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
yes, it's a hard job. For each successful case there are thousands which fail.
> 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.
This is more or less what many streamers are saying about it too. And most streamers are eager to get out of this self-destructive lifestyle with age. Streaming is a though gamble, and most are losing it. Educating about the harsh price of this is good and necessary, and the article is pretty fair there IMHO.
If they had instead wrote the article about a drug dealer making $500k a year, explaining the downsides of that line of work, would you also think the journalist was just jealous?
The point of the article is that this seems like a lifestyle destined to cause issues later in life.
Not all "issues" are equal; a job that requires regularly committing felonies has much more severe potential "issues later in life" than working a few too many hours a week.
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.
Agree, I thought the way the article was written made me really sympathetic to Tyler. Plus, while the article does talk about streamers in general, I really read it much more as a story about this specific streamer, not about streamers in general.
Streaming aside, tyler1 has an almost inhuman dedication and focus when it comes to League of Legends. On Hacker News it's common to hear that programmers can't work (on classic programming tasks) for more than ~4 hours a day. I also feel exhausted after working for ~4 hours and have always wondered if this was some sort of mental trap I'd fallen into or a genuine limit.
Games like League of Legends require complete focus and attention yet he somehow manages to regularly stream for 10 hours and sometimes reaches peaks of over 30 hours(!!!)[1]. Can you imagine solving leetcode problems (even easy ones) for 30 hours?
In 2020 he paused streaming so he could focus solely on going from Diamond (mid-to-high tier) to Challenger (highest tier). If I recall correctly, he said he would sleep on the couch by his computer, wake up, play and go back to sleep on the couch after ~17 hours.
I don't follow League of Legends (I prefer Dota) but tyler1 has always stood out to me as a person with an incomparable focus and dedication. I haven't seen anything similar in the Dota community and the only programmers that jump to mind would be geohotz or maybe Nick Winter[2].
Do you really imply that playing the same game over and over again (with some variables but still) is the same as solving programming problems?
The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don't want anyone to get that impression.
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 relieved. I don't think this will convince you, but perhaps consider being open to the possibility that it genuinely is as difficult as solving most programming problems that we face in our day-to-day work. In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems.
I've played League of Legends for nearly 10 years.
Not to take anything away from Tyler1, because he really goes above and beyond, but it really doesn't take much mental focus or anything really to play it. Programming? It takes focus, you really have to think sometimes. But League? When I'm tired the game plays itself. It just feels like muscle memory.
It might take a bit more effort to play at a consistently high level. But I'm pretty sure it's mostly muscle memory for him too. There's very little actual thinking other than the big picture of what objectives to take and I'm sure when he's playing for 20+ hours he's just on autopilot for the majority of the time.
To put it into comparison with how little mental power it personally takes me, I like to watch a lot of Anime, that's Japanese animation with English subtitles. I can't watch Anime if I'm tired because keeping track of subtitles and what's on screen actually takes a substantial amount of mental power. But I can bash out 5 games of LoL back to back when I'm equally as tired.
Playing a game like LoL is like being in a battle or war.
Would you watch anime and shoot your gun with 'muscle memory' while fighting 5 ruthless, intelligent opponents?
A fight requires constant reevaluation of the situation and planning to win the game. If you play by "muscle memory" and win, you are playing against weak unthinking opponents or getting carried by your team.
If you played against good players, trust me you won't win thinking about anime and chilling. And it's very stressful because you're constantly on guard.
> Would you watch anime and shoot your gun with 'muscle memory' while fighting 5 ruthless, intelligent opponents?
Easy. At some point some actions are so engraved that you respond without even thinking. Example: blinking out on a slight enemy sight.
> A fight requires constant reevaluation of the situation and planning to win the game. If you play by "muscle memory" and win, you are playing against weak unthinking opponents or getting carried by your team.
> If you played against good players, trust me you won't win thinking about anime and chilling. And it's very stressful because you're constantly on guard.
You can use all those big words, but reality is completely different. I've watched amateur/pro Dota 2 since it's inception in 2011 and some pro Dota 1 before that. It is a team game, it is more about team cooperation and heroes you pick. Sure small things can overturn the game, but most of the time it is about bigger game than small actions.
There's a difference between "playing the game" and playing the game. I can sit at a chess board and move pieces around and say that chess takes no focus because I chose not to focus
Is there thought? How do you know his skills are not due to a few hours (tens of hours, hundreds of hours) of intense training of a few basic rules, and the rest is just freeroaming like it is for every other player?
Because there are other players on the other side of the game. They will be at comparable levels of "intense training of a few basic rules" (due to ELO based matchmaking) and they will be trying as hard as they can to beat him.
Are you a pro League player? Because if not this is irrelevant. Even the difference between leagues is substantial. And I have played since beta if that makes a difference. Sure I am not bad and I get that I could auto-pilot. But I doubt either of us are all that good; I certainly am not a pro, despite playing for a decade+
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.
League is extremely fun and addicting. Its a huge dopamine kick. When I play, I stay hooked for hours on end and have to stop myself.
When I code, I'm mostly just thinking hard and not very happy. The best part is the "aha" moment, and the huge dopamine kick of solving the programming/debugging problem. It is also NOT addicting.
These are two completely different things. I'm not sure why you're so determined to compare the two. They are insanely different.
This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level.
You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phrasing - but I think you're overlooking a lot.
I was at a party once, talking to a stranger about why I loved programming so much. They said: "Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's _just_ programming, right?". That's how this comment reads to me - "At the end of the day, it's just playing a game, right?"
There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
Your response is really not adequate to what I wrote above, you seem to be projecting some past experiences that you had with people not giving you credit on me and it feels like a very unfortunate and provocative stance.
If I wanted to respond in the same tone, I could say: "The guy is not a pro player, he doesn't compete at the highest level, he just grinds solo queue for 10 hours per day on Adderall. He got this way because he had a mixture of talent and addiction susceptibility. He got addicted to the dopamine hits that the free to play game was meticulously designed to deliver in a pattern that makes the player unable to stop even if he hates it and feels miserable."
But I will say this: I think you're misinterpreting my comment as scorn when in reality it's my perspective based on my experiences with coding and playing this game. I know both, so I believe that my opinion is valuable and I decided to share it.
> There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
It's the same as with any activity.
Time * dedication * (1 + natural talent)
> This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level.
I've done both, I'm not disregarding amount of skill and dedication it takes. But it is completely different from programming.
Competetive gaming is akin to real sports, more about situation, luck and reaction rather than natural wits. All games are following patterns which you can learn just by spending time in game which adheres to limited set of rules defined by game logic.
I have 5?k hours in LoL around high plat / in previous season low diamond and I'd say that LoL while being different from competitive programming
is still exhausting if you want to play it with full focus for a few hours.
Of course there's difference between playing ARAMs for fun and tryharding on "relatively competent" ELO where you try to do not commit mistakes as hard as you can and games are not "fiestas" (lack of strategy, just fighting)
>You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Significant part of day2day programming can be pretty brainless/trivial too - yet another gluing json over http. Don't get me wrong, there are insanely exhausting projects too.
During programming you can take break whenever you want, go to kitchen, watch memes, hn, read news, blabla, meanwhile when you're in game, then you can't*.
I mean I'm not saying that I do not feel exhausted after playing
Matches where e.g we lose early game and have to come back somehow by avoiding commiting mistakes hard and somehow catching off somebody from enemy team could be exhausting cuz you're basically balacing on the edge for 30min :P
Except when you're drained you won't have the creativity to solve another programming task. But you will be able to queue up again. It also gets easier the more you play, because you're relying on the same skills that you build up with every match.
I haven't ever played a MOBA, but fixing bugs (which takes up a significant amount of developer time), seems to be about as rote as playing an RTS (which I have played, albeit almost 20 years ago).
I humbly disagree, and if you have not competed at the pro level in an RTS (Starcraft is another absurdly hard game that requires hundreds of actions a minute) then I believe your view is skewed. When I code all day there are tasks I can auto pilot. Rebase from gerrit, an amend, maybe hunting down answers on Stack Overflow. Sure, I get that coding != video games. But the skills Tyler has or someone who plays as a pro Star Craft player are Masters at a craft that takes way more than auto pilot. In many cases it is physically demanding too and I think you’re giving the wrong impression. It’s not a game at that point, it’s a profession, and an absurdly tough one at that. Machines can beat people at chess. Our AI had struggled for years to beat humans at Star Craft. I find that inspiring, and am in awe some people can push themselves so hard to be that good.
Playing a high level game of Starcraft or Dota is more exhausting to me then programming. With programming I have to think of some designs, spend some times with the tooling, setting things up, to all the busy work surrounding the core problem and so on. Sure there are moments when you really have to think very hard about what you do as well, but its not constant.
I can take easy breaks. Run some tests and so on.
When playing a game you have to be totally focused for longer periods and not just focus but also execute and handle the concept of being activity opposed. Its like if you were programming and the compiler was activity being evil.
At gunpoint, I'd rather code 12 hours a day than play LoL or CS:GO 12 hours a day. Because programming is less exhausting and my code doesn't insult my mother on VOIP. And I say that as a gamer and esports enthusiast.
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.
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.
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.
I think the impressive thing is doing it day after day. I can do lots of things, including programming, for 12+ hours. The trouble is, after a day or two of that, I desperately don't want to do whatever-it-is for several days or weeks. I want to go do other stuff.
It's the doing it day after day on a regular schedule that makes me feel like I never really recover from programming, and just want to zone out and stare at the wall until bed time, having very little energy left for anything either fun or productive, after 4-5 hours, most days.
I'll even do that with video games. Get the family out of the house and give me a weekend, I'll play vidja games for like 16 hours. Then wake up the second day and not want to touch a game for at least a week, and instead start doing home improvement projects or whatever. Or sit outside and read a book all day. Not because I feel like I should, but because it's the thing I most want to be doing, and I have zero desire to look at a screen for a good long while.
The regularity of work is what makes it so damn draining, for me. I'm sure it'd ruin gaming for me in short order, too, though I'd have fared a lot better at it back when I was in my teens or early 20s than I would now, for sure. I can't do 30 waking hours of anything now. 24 just about ruins me. I could get to about 36-38 before hitting a wall and passing out for like 12 hours, back then. 30 wasn't that big a deal, and I hit that mark pretty often (usually, yeah, playing video games for a good chunk of it).
> Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems?
Firstly, I probably wouldn't classify the work most of us do as "solving open-ended computer science problems" so I'm not trying to make a comparison to that work.
Secondly, I guess it stands out to me because I watch other people play the same addictive game and are unable to play at a high level for the same lengths of time. If it were just an addictive property of the game, we should expect to see thousands of tyler1's as we see thousands of heroin addicts. Since we do not, it makes me think that there's something special with him.
He takes Adderall my dude. I'm a developer and I use absolutely no cognitive enhancers. If I took Adderall I would be able to code for 20 hours straight. I took a small dose back in college and that stuff is insanely good for long hours at anything.
Also, I'm speculating here, but I think he is on Testosterone Replacement Therapy, which also has insane energy, mood and cognitive enhancements.
Lastly he takes a ton of stimulants.
I don't for a moment think he's working purely off "natural" energy.
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 limited by the low number of customers that a b2b startup had in the 80s.
I could also play MMORPGs and Dota 2 for 10 hours straight without any break, I can barely sit one hour solving LC/learning something.
And before you account this to age, even now I could spend whole day playing some addictive game like a robot.
I think it's totally ridiculous that some are treating this at "not a real job".
It just shows that many people do not understand what is going one at all.
Sure it's a form of "entertainer" job, but actress, synchron speaker or comedian are also real jobs.
And no one would go and say "oh say just need to say some lines on stage so it's not a real job". It's not at all as simple as "just playing games in front of camera".
Sure some people do just that as a hobby, but then people also program as a hobby and programming is still a real job.
And sure many just barely make enough to cover living expanses, but that's true for many jobs which still are "real jobs".
No idea why people feel to denounce people which act as entertainers while also often managing a merch job and a community as "not having a real job"? Is it be of envy that some people have and at their job and where able to turn their hobby into a job?
Either-way it's not just a real job it's like many jobs from the entertainment business not an easy job to get successful with, without a "clear" path to success, requiring often both hard work, talent and luck and with often not-so rosy long term aspects and just a few managing to get rich or wealthy, while many other are sooner or later forced to change their job. You know like in many other jobs in the entertainment industries, e.g. musician/singer.
Ya and it’s amazing that people think it can be easily replicated. To get to that level you must be the one percent of the one percent of gamers typically. Most coders can be “professional” with a boot camp these days.
A real job is one where a boss can arbitrarily fire you so that you learn to respect your elders and anybody who doesn't have a real job is bypassing the critical societal conditioning step and should be shamed.
What's the career progression for streamers and eSports players, anyway? I feel like everyone that does this now is going to be tired of it in 5 years, and then they're just 30 and without a college degree or job experience.
I know a few ex-YouTubers, and they're all doing just fine. Working in PR, marketing, agents for other creators, etc. Sure, they don't all have a degree... but they have a ton of connections and relevant experience.
Any of the giants should hopefully have been saving there money and have quite a bunch tucked away. Any of the smaller ones should have been doing something on the side, or at least have a plan B ready.
Also, not sure why we're assuming no college degree here.
Or that running a successful business for a decade doesn't count as experience that most businesses would be happy to hire on. Being a successful twitch streamer involves extremely good time management and a lot of hands on advertising. They've got a lot more proof of successful marketing than most PR folks you might look at hiring.
Nowadays there are financial planners focusing on content creators/streaming talent who will know the specifics of tax structures and advantages, etc. as well.
But what if you're not one of the top streamers, and you just get 250 viewers a few times a week? I watch a lot of people like that. It seems to pay for room and board, but I worry about their future.
Why is that a problem? Nobody cares for the millions of people that try to be professional athletes, musicians, artists or dancers that are barely making ends meet and ultimately move on to something else.
This is just like any other endeavor. Many try, most fail, some succeed wildly. We don't need to feel bad for the people that try and fail. That is part of life and progressing as a person.
What's the alternative? Alot of these people are great entertainers and terrible <anything else>. If they weren't streaming they'd be working shifts at McDonalds. If anything they're doing the most advantageous thing they could be doing.
The same career path as a professional athlete. Some go into commentating, some go into sports management, and most retire broke and have to pick up a whole new career in their late 20s/early 30s.
Twitch streaming can be extremely practical if you're being sustainable about it. Assuming you're actually watching your income and expenses and being smart about when to hire on additional help you can make a pretty darn successful career. I'd point to T90[1] as an example of someone that isn't near the top 1% but has built an extremely sustainable business including paid moderators and content editors (for sending clips to YouTube).
The skills and experience they've picked up directly translates to a number of "practical" careers: affiliate marketing, social media marketing, PR, community building, video and audio editing, etc. not to mention game-related careers in eSports, game development, etc.
There are quite a few streamers who have been doing it for more than a decade at this point with no sign of slowing down.
On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to sell the skill of building a large following to employers, and plenty of companies looking for people who are experts in social media/streaming platforms.
why does every endeavor require career progression? its [Current Year] can't people just enjoy something, take the money and invest it, then go to college, start a business, make a RE empire?
Ask a few military vets, many legitimately just start at the bottom at the totem some place novel into their mid 30s.
Right? Can't you just enjoy being in a good place and stay there?
Maybe I'm jaundiced because I just had to fill out my annual review self-assessment and skipped the "5-year plan" because I simply couldn't be bothered to lie about it.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but cars are the definition of an absolutely terrible investment - they might beat out randomly hoping you'll land big on r/wallstreetbets but both are extremely poor investment decisions.
Ordinary cars are a strongly depreciating asset. However, above a certain level this stops being true. I had the fortune to buy, use and subsequently sell a number of higher end cars (Ferrari, Lamborghini) and I made little to no loss on any of them. In fact, the Ferrari 458, which to this day I consider the best supercar to drive, appreciated during the year or so I had it.
It sounds like the cars might have slightly more than broken even on cost for you which sounds like a terrible investment option when you've got everything from real estate to mutual funds that will generally outperform cars - and, much like stock picking, most of the models you purchased didn't significantly appreciate - just one ended up gaining in value.
I suppose I was misinformed in that I thought that cars of all value ranges were pretty disastrous assets to hold - but it sounds like holding on to them for value appreciation still isn't a particularly good tactic.
When you have enough cash on hand to buy one, chances are you already have investments in money-returning assets, and you're diversifying into entertainment-returning ones. No point making a bunch of money just to spend it all on making more money. If you can tie up a bundle of cash for a year, get a bunch of entertainment out of it, then liquidate for approximately the same amount, who is to complain?
I'm assuming they were making a comment about the value of classic cars. Some of them could absolutely be a good investment, if, (big, giant, planet sized) if you know what you are doing.
We have decades of examples of how this works out for pro athletes. The answer is that there's a range of outcomes: some have to find new careers after their playing days are over; others find ancillary work (coaching, scouting) in the sports industry; the very best make enough money that they don't need to work anymore. In many cases, the athletes have a college degree of at least some value.
Professional video game streaming is relatively new. It's a valid question.
It's a valid question, but the answer is simple: nearly the same thing that sports players do when they stop being the player. They either coach, manage, promote their brand, or switch careers.
One concern I could see in e-sports vs traditional (and I don't follow e-sports closely, so maybe I'm wrong) is that the games being played change regularly. Do the skills of a top player of one generation of games tend to translate well to coaching top players for the next generation of games, or would any such coach look more like Ted Lasso?
I'm sure professional athletes in non-traditional physical sports have had to face the same questions — e.g. Tony Hawk. And in reality a lot of people put in professional levels of effort into traditional sports without reaping the kind of career-defining rewards one would associate with "professional athletes".
Yes. A lot of professional athletes don’t really make much money. They get normal salaries and play for non major league teams or federations of some sort.
Eventually though they will have to quit their sport due to wear and tear and no longer being at a peak level. And most will probably never really progress to a level where they can make some quick millions from a contract and then retire early.
I'm a proponent of the idea that your athletic scholarship at a Division I-A school should be for "sports degree" and that it should entitle you to come back prepaid for an "academic" 4 year degree when that track runs out.
That would stop a lot of the idiocy we see around "student athletes".
I know an ex-WoW professional player. He didn't make a ton of money. After it was over he went back to school, and is now a very talented software engineer.
Doing anything at a high level tends to cultivate skills that translate to other areas. General skills like focus and discipline come to mind.
Reminds me of Travis Morrison, lead singer of the indie band The Dismemberment Plan who were popular in the 90s/early 2000s. After his retirement from music he became a web developer who at one point worked for the washington post and huffington post.
His girlfriend (now wife) describes the experience of being with someone who was once somewhat famous in this article [0] -- There were moments of extreme cognitive dissonance when I saw him up there. He’s a wild and expert showman on stage. As I’d watch him do things like play the keyboard by smashing it with his forehead, spit water all over the audience or writhe convulsively on the ground, I would think, “I can’t believe this is the same man who likes to go to bed at 10 o’clock and sweetly brings me coffee in bed every morning.”
If someone is an esports player, it would be hard to stay a professional (in most action games at least) at age 30 simply due to natural wear on your hands and reaction times getting slower.
This doesn't really make sense. Athletes in many sports are playing way past their 'prime' these days and they are wearing out much more than just their hands. Consistently good reaction times are a result of consistent training. Plenty of older baseball/tennis players have superhuman reaction times. I would see mental fatigue and boredom as being the major hurdle to playing esports on a professional level at an older age. No matter how fun it started as, 10+ years of looking at the same thing over and over has got to be soul sucking.
It's counterintuitive, but if you look at eSports players, the prime years are much lower (both the start and the end). You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. It feels like the prime is really 16-25. Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important, and hands are one of the worst things to wear out. More parts != more wear out. There's a reason why there are (general) physical therapists and physical therapists who specialize in hands. Hands are incredibly complex and soft tissue injuries heal very poorly due to lack of blood supply.
I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes.
eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week.
Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.
Its not really counterintuitive, the prime years are lower because true physical development in physical sports starts at a later age, everything up to that point is related to building a physical foundation for movement, building an interest in the sport, and laying groundwork for proper mechanics.
There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable).
"Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.
1. Most professional athletes have very short careers.
2. The athletes who do play "past their prime" are usually making up for reduced physical acuity with other skills (e.g. you don't see very many baseball players hit triples after 30).
3. Players with long careers invest a huge amount of time in conditioning, and to a hard-to-measure degree, PEDs.
4. I don't really follow eSports; If someone played Starcraft competitively 20 years ago, are they still playing SC, or do they switch to something else like LoL? What's the typical competitive "lifetime" of a game? If you picked up game-specific skills, it might be harder to apply #2 when the game du-jour changes.
5. As a slight nitpick to the whole conversation, my understanding is that "reaction time" is perhaps a misnomer; the drop in reaction time with age for performing a simple activity appears to be relatively minor, but more complex activities (including habitual ones like driving), which suggests that the performance decline is in selecting and/or executing the proper response to a stimuli rather than what we think of as pure "reaction time"
In physical sports the barrier to entry is very high. Even if you have good reaction time, high strength, etc. you will still need 1000s of hours of practice from a very young age to excel.
In e-sports there's millions of people practicing every day and the built in ranking system can filter that down to the current top 0.1%. At this point branching out into actual competitions is not nearly as difficult as getting noticed by a NBA, NFL, etc. recruiter.
It does depend on the Game. CSGO players play a very limited number of maps so pure reaction time and hand-eye coordination is often the deciding factor. Strategy games like LoL and softer FPS games like Fortnite are less dependent on physical talent.
The ranking system in physical and mental sports is essentially the same, it comes down to: 'can you beat or compete with X person consistently', and just for context...there were over a million high school football players participating in 2019, and this is mostly in organized play. If I want to get noticed in League, I have to grind a queue for ungodly amount of hours to get to a respectable ranking and then solicit myself to teams for proper team based competition...good luck with all that.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 30 years is a number of much importance for this. Most Esports scenes also aren't old enough to have older players as well.
The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while.
In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.
I think a decent few of them find positions in related fields like talent management or esports. They do probably develop pretty decent relationships in those industries.
You could ask the same of any developer in their 30s or 40s, most of whom earn less per year than the subject of TFA, and who similarly will have trouble finding work in their field in 10-20 years (if the ageism doesn't go away).
What's the big deal starting at age 30? you still got another 30 years to work at least, if not more. You just study some profession and start working in the field.
This article is fascinating for the effects it has on readers.
We likely all understand that one of the toxic forces in our culture today is the compulsive need to turn every story and news article into a clear moral narrative with a pure protagonist and a villainous antagonist. Reality isn't like that at all, and when journalists force reality into that framework, it distorts our perception of the world in unhealthy ways.
But when an article comes out that doesn't do that, that just says "here are some people and what their experience is like", it seems many of us are unprepared to handle it. In the comments here, I see this rorschach-like phenomenon where each reader imagines a morality play, superimposes it on the article, and then gets surprised when others saw something different.
This isn't an acticle about good guys and bad guys, winning and losing, the good or evil of capitalism. It's just a window into one person's life. It's a useful article because this is a kind of person whose life affects many of us—a lot of people here watch popular streamers—but where we have little insight into the whole picture of how that impacts their life.
We should relish journalism like this. There is no need to jump to any moral conclusion. Just witness and understand a bit more about the variety of lives people live today.
Agreed. I'm kinda shook at a lot of the comments here, IMO missing the point (or lack of point) of the article. It's a slice of life view into a poignantly tragic story of a kid "lucking" into a terrible pair of golden handcuffs - a view into the apex of parasocial relationships. Someone who so clearly lacks any semblance of a social life, in the same hand creating a social environment for thousands of people - chiefly centered around making fun of him. There's no moral "good" or "bad" here.
As readers we can draw our own conclusions here, but to call the author biased into making the life/platform/phenomenon of twitch streamers bad? That's just a really narrow view of a fairly compelling article.
Sure his life seems like a nightmare, but to be honest, wouldn't it have been even worse without the streaming. Then he'd probably still be playing computer games all the time, still living in squalor, but he'd be broke. Now he's at least able to save up a lot of money.
Streamer here.
It makes me sad to see that kind of numbers. There is plenty of interesting and attaching personnalities but the crowd focus on top tier streamers.
I not complain for me, I'm in the top tier of my niche but I see many people with unit viewers while being positive for other people. That's why I systematically send my viewers to smaller streamer when I stop the live.
If some of you wonder why viewers give us money, from my experience, the stream is a comfortable place for them.
But how a 26k people chat could be comfortable? You instantly loose the special link with the streamer by being flooded into the chat. On the streamer side, I can't imagine loosing the special link I have with the community.
With 240 messages per minute, it's impossible to meet anyone. I'm lucky to have made friendships and even working relationship through the stream.
For anyone curious about how twitch and HN can meet, go to the Twitch "software and development" category.
I think for most streams there's no real need to watch them from start til end. You can just tune in and out at will without missing much. For many it probably just runs in the background while they do other things, like some people do with soap operas on TV.
Personally, as a programmer I usually have a Twitch stream (often Tyler1's) running on a second monitor as background noise if I'm not listening to music. However, the most active chatters are mainly college students in my experience.
The streamer is 8 hours in, not the audience. Also, if you think how much free time children, teenagers and NEET adults have, yeah, 5+h per day watching games is completely doable during a pandemic.
You have it on in the background. Some streams have a very engaged community, everyone is there flooding the chat all the time. But in most streams the viewers aren't engaging, they have it on the background, it is on their second monitor while they play games or work or whatever. Viewership went way up during the pandemic too.
I don't think it is for everyone but I prefer it to TV/Netflix/whatever. I didn't even play games when I started watching (I do now, but only once or twice a week). Some people prefer amateur porn to Brazzers.
Or just keep it on in a background tab with headphones on? I've always got some kind of podcast running or twitch if I'm not doing deep work (I do frontend, so I'll listen to stuff when writing boilerplate vs problem solving).
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 this is a zero sum game). I'm sure having zillions of dollars doesn't make you happy, but there's so much unwarranted hate here on HN for new ventures and disruptive industries, it's kind of odd. It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. "If it's popular, it must be bad" is a pretty myopic view.
You may have gotten bitten by a variant of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) in which initial comments are shallow dismissals and then more substantive comments appear over time. The initial comments don't characterize the community. They just appear first because they're reflexive reactions (the fastest kind of reaction to have) and they're shallow (the fastest kind of comment to write).
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 feed on young blood that won't be able to keep up later in life.
I completely agree with you, this kind of "this is not a real job" attitude really comes off as people upset that they can't be millionaires at their job.
EDIT: A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job". I am not trying to argue against that or say that Twitch is a good job prospect. My point is that if they do succeed in that niche, trying to segment money-making endeavour between "real jobs" and "just a kid playing video games" seems very vain to me. Tyler is making millions providing entertainment, to me that is very much a real job.
I knew G to PG-13 rated camgirls that were making six figures back in 1997 to 2000. They eventually got disrupted by the adult industry providing more explicit content for much less money upfront. OnlyFans seems to have reinvented this model at scale, but what's the average margin for an OnlyFans provider? $180/month.
I’m familiar with two women doing financial domination stuff. One of them is fully PG-13. It’s interesting there are still certain niches where you don’t have to go past R rates stuff and can bring in mid 5 figures or higher.
The sad part is that's only bringing in mid-5 figures which makes me think that findom is an efficient market and I await the Harvard Business Review case study of it with baited breath.
I was specifically speaking to PG-13-ish ones. Once you go nude and other elements go farther, the money presumably goes up a lot.
Hard to get accurate numbers for a lot of online hustle industries. There’s a lot of grandstanding, exaggerating, or laying really low about finances. Like say affiliate marketers or SEO people.
> I await the Harvard Business Review case study of it with baited breath.
>A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job".
To support your point, acting, singing and writing are in a similar state, as are most media works. Creative media seems in particular its the area where the gulf between the successful and the well, not, is massive.
This is true, but I have to wonder whether those things are as grueling as streaming is.
I did some user interviews with streamers for a project. None were this successful; the people talked to ranged from making a decent living to having a day job and then doing streaming as a full-time second job.
Even the ones like Tyler were feeling the same strain he is. But the ones who seemed worst off were the ones who were putting in the same level of effort but making peanuts or were net negative on a cash basis. I remember one guy I talked to who said that he never talked to his old friends; everybody he spent time with now was a streamer because he didn't have time for anything else.
In contrast the actors I used to know seemed to have a much healthier relationship to their art. They were working hard and trying to make it, but I don't recall the same sense of ruthless grind I got from the streamers. Ditto the writers I know these days.
I don't think it's a case of gruelling, it's more that streaming is the social outcast version of acting. You have to interact with people to act else it doesn't work. Streaming can be entirely solo, even at the top end
Nobody is forcing you to be live 12 hours a day. Most of the super effort no reward streamers would benefit by cutting the live hours and working more on marketing anyway. Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth
Not to imply any negativity in this comment if it reads that way, just shite at words. I've dabbled in streaming and realised I need to build up the audience first otherwise it's a massive timesink
> Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth
Might be in part because the search function is so bad. I tried to use twitch to discover DJ slash electronic music streams, and had a really hard time finding what I wanted, though I could sometimes find them using other keywords.
Sorry, I don't understand this. I admittedly don't watch much streaming. But every streamer I've ever seen interacts constantly with their audience. And the ones I interviewed are intensely conscious of their audience and the need to make them feel special.
The actors I knew mainly focused on craft and collaboration with teams. If they dealt with the audience at all, it was in very controlled bursts in the minutes after a performance. So it seems to me that streaming is much more socially demanding.
Sitting at a computer interacting with a non-red HAL9000 and IRC is not the same as interacting with directors, producers, other actors.. people
There are more people in acting than the audience
POV: you're a streamer interacting with the audience https://cdn.imgy.org/j6km.jpg (chat unrelated, I just picked the one in my follows that would fill the screen quickest)
idk it just doesn't feel social to me at all, never mind socially demanding
Sorry, I'm not getting it. Are you a successful streamer and are offering your own experience as evidence? Or are you a non-streamer just giving your general take?
You make my point with that screenshot. The chat isn't unrelated. The chat is primary. The streamers I talked to and the streaming I've watched is a performance for an audience. It's way more interactive than most live theater, even the stuff with audience participation. And it's leaps and bounds more socially demanding than film work.
As an example, watch this video from a streamer with 120k followers on Twitch:
While playing the game she is deeply involved a conversation with the people watching. As streamers explained it to me, that's key to the economics of being a successful streamer, in that significant audience segments are buying a feeling of being in the in-group, and that feeling has to be supported with actual interaction with the streamer.
I agree that's not the same thing as being on the same stage with people. But it's still very social. Similarly, remote work is still social. I've never met any of my colleagues, for example, but they're still people to me.
It's very competitive and tends to follow the Pareto principle, i.e. 10% of the people making 90% of the money. Some of it is luck and timing, some of it is hard work. Some of it probably comes down to your taste being more aligned with a broader audience.
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.
I am not saying this is a real job prospect. If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one, same as professional singer or musician in general.
What I am saying that what Tyler has very much is a real job and successful business. You wouldn't say Taylor Swift is jobless because very few people make it in the pop music world.
If my kid told me they wanted to be a twitch streamer I would advise them against investing a significant amount of time and effort building a business with a single gatekeeper.
If they wanted to be a famous personality, I would insist they start building a profile on every platform.
This isn't well known, but to monetize on Twitch (i.e. be able to receive subscriptions and bits), you have to sign an affiliate agreement[1], which includes a clause prohibiting you from multi-streaming, or putting your VODs up anywhere else for a full day after their conclusion. This severely limits your ability to cross platforms.
One is taken for granted, but I think it is a valid point. I share your opinion (bad to depend on platforms), but that never might have triggered the comment.
For some people never means usually not, and for some never means never :)
I'd advise them to dominate a new platform as an early adopter and then spread out from there. Or put out content very consistently on 2-3 platforms. But even spreading yourself between two accounts let alone multiple platforms is time consuming.
>If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one
You'd be lying though, and your kid would probably grow up to resent it. There are ways to educate kids about the relative risks of careers in good faith.
To give some numbers: There are more than 10 millions Streamers on Twitch, of which 5 millions are streaming regularly. The top 10_000 of them earns barely minimum wage or more. The Top 1000-5000 is earning some decent money on middle-class-level and the millionairs-club is around Top 100. And these numbers are globally, meaning all streamers from all countries.
So we are still talking about an absurd low number of people.
Now do the numbers with startups.
I thought the hackernews community embraces taking risk and doing your own thing. I am surprised to see the conservatism here.
A service that makes 100 users a millionaire is a low number? And by the way, there is no way to know how much people are really making because they not only get money through Twitch but also through tip systems, merchandise, promotion, sponsors and other revenue generating activities.
Yes, but the twitch-numbers reflect a streamers potential for earning money through merchandise, promotion, sponsors and other revenue generating activities. There usually is a direct enough link between them. Tipping is a bit more special, but it's quite unlikely that a small 20 viewer-streamer will get a million-dollar-tip regularly. So you can make an educated guess of the general income, at least regarding someone's success as a streamer.
Of course it's always possible that someone is far more successful outside of twitch. Like an established celeb who streams without monetization. But I don't think it makes sense to discuss those special cases here.
Yes, the viewer numbers are the direct link. But viewer numbers are not Twitch revenue. Subscriber are Twitch revenue. And it is not at all impossible to have a lot of viewers and not a lot of subscribers.
How are you going to know what the stream is earning the musician keeping contact with his fan base?
I think making it to top on Twitch/TikTok/SocialMedia is hard, just like it is hard to be a famous Hollywood star. But there are a lot of minor social media celebrities that make a middle class income or they do it as their second job but no one talks about them just like how no one talks about minor actors.
I know this because recently I ran into a few Instagram influencers with a low 6-figure followers, who get paid $1000+ per ad post. The ones I know have day jobs, Instagram is mostly extra income for them. I also know a blogger who is doing it fulltime and making upper middle class income from it.
The point is power law seems absurd because it is easy to start these things but very few people actually treat it like a job or a business. To me it seems those who treat it like a business have pretty high chance of making, at least, living wages from it.
What definition of "real job" are you using? By that definition, any kind of performer (music, sports, etc) is not a "real job". Hell, starting most businesses including startups would not be a "real job," since most fail. I guess you can definite it this way if you want, but I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate.
Hasn't it always been this way in music, art, writing, and media? Making a living doing any kind of art or media has always been brutal. How many rock bands made a decent living, let alone serious money?
Once you have a few millions secured, it is hard to blow it if you invest and save prudently. It's not like when he turns 30 he will be back to poverty. There is too much negativity and doom and gloom. These gamers, e-celebs are making a lot of money and will not be destitute when their star fades. Today's internet celebs are much better at saving and investing their money compared to celebs of decades ago, who blew their money on extravagant expenses and saved nothing.
Actually it's very easy to blow some millions. Sportspeople, lotto-winners and such are doing it all the time. Handling money wisely is a skill you need to learn and master.
That guy is in esports, so he is generally very risk-friendly, so chances are high that he is also investing and wasting his money on risky investments and potentially losing it.
I think these twitter gamers and celebs are smarter than mainstream athletes lotto winners in terms of higher IQ , and thus are better at personal finance and budgeting
Why would this group of people have higher IQs than mainstream athletes? Why would higher IQ lead to better personal finance and budgeting?
I’d think you childhood/background and your current environment would be the biggest factors.
Some mainstream athletes may feel the need to flex. So they may spend extra money. There’s also generally certain rituals or going with the crowd that means spending more money.
It feels elitist to call these gamers and celebs both smarter than mainstream athletes and label the latter as lotto winners. Unless you were talking about lotto winners as a separate group. Though that too appears problematic as you’re more closely associating them with mainstream athletes in a negative sense.
Lotto winners also have societal, environmental, and cultural issues many other wealthy people like streamers don’t. No one thinks the lotto winner deserves their money. People have far easier time coming out of the woodwork and hassling lotto winners. Asking for money and more.
All highly paid celebrities without managers, including many streamers, are effectively running marketing and PR campaigns for million-dollar brands. It's quite believable to me that the job would select for higher intelligence, or at least better cash flow management, than being an athlete who plays a team sport.
Your wording makes what streamers and other influencers have to do without managers as much harder and serious than it is.
Celebrity is already pushing it. In the scale of fame, someone doing all the work themselves likely is pretty down the list in terms of celebrity.
Many celebs without managers don’t need to do much marketing and PR for their brand. There’s countless YouTube or IG etc accounts with millions of subscribers that don’t have a concerted marketing and especially not PR campaign going on.
Many, possibly most, sports players do not have managers. Most have agents only.
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For cash flow. Leagues like the NBA and NFL have become more serious with helping out and making sure the players manage money better. Still a long way to go.
Overall, I don’t see any reason why streamers and online celebs would have higher intelligence. The reasons people are giving appear to be biased toward giving credence to tech white collar work.
Look at the number of online influencers peddling all sorts of scummy NFT and crypto stuff. If their PR was so important, these online celebs would have had to do major damage control. They largely haven’t. If at all. This makes it seem like there’s much less serious pressure and real stakes at play for online celebs. There’s other various things online celebs have done and continue to do that just is not done by the vast vast majority of athletes. The ones that do behave like divas are ostracized. This isn’t the case with online celebs.
I don’t think either selects for higher intelligence.
>Why would this group of people have higher IQs than mainstream athletes?
Though I disagree with the posters theory that twitch gamers are less susceptible to blowing their fortune than athletes, the fact that their job doesn't come with a high risk of head trauma is a reason they may be smarter.
Does this factor in with basketball, soccer (futbol), tennis, And many other sports?
Also, just my personal opinion. I’d rather make $10M over my 20s with some head trauma than have to slave away as a random cog employee. I know people can delude themselves into believing they aren’t. Some believe their work matters a lot. I doubt many would do the same work id they had millions in savings though.
This doesn’t make streamers any smarter to me. This posits that streamers would not be streamers if streaming entailed the same risk of head trauma as the NFL and hockey. I personally believe people would want the game and money so they’d still do it.
>Does this factor in with basketball, soccer (futbol), tennis, And many other sports?
My understanding is that though most of those sports have a lower rate of head trauma than football or hockey, they still have a far higher rate of head trauma than the general public. To the point where I doubt many professional soccer or basketball players haven't had at least one concussion like event from the sport.
If I were guaranteed $10m for a concussion I'd take that deal in a second. Having a high chance of a concussion for a very low chance of $10m is a different matter.
I only see streamers as smarter as their low chance of millions doesn't have the associated risk of head trauma, though I agree that it's unlikely anybody is picking their long shot based on the potential injury.
edit read your other reply and can sum up or difference in opinions easily.
>I don’t think either selects for higher intelligence
Neither do I, but I think the process for athletes has more of a negative effect on intelligence than streaming does. Purely due to injuries.
What do you think about the possibility of athletes are not sitting at a desk in front of their computer screen 10 hours a day like streamers? I’m generalizing with the numbers :). Instead they are exercising? That has to count for something, no? Maybe a few streamers are doing treadmill desks but I’d think that will always remain incredibly rare. Standing desks may be used a little more but I don’t know.
I understand streamers can exercise in their own time. It is debatable if exercising for an isolated one hour a day is any where close to the same as regular fitness.
General unhealthiness is probably common with streamers but though it may decrease their expected life span, but it's nowhere near as permanently hazardous as what head injuries can do to a person. Additionally, they just aren't dedicating enough free time to taking care of themselves while athletes need to put themselves in danger for part of their sport.
And as a related aside, I think many of the actual esports teams have realized the importance of health for competitions and devote a fair amount of time to it.
I'd be very interested for your evidence there. Both that streamers are higher IQ, and that high IQ means more responsible financial behaviors for people in power-law industries like this.
I've known plenty of smart people who were terrible with money, and plenty of average people who were very good at managing it. There's a huge gap between intellectual understanding and practical skill. And I've known some brilliant people whose brilliance made them confident the money would keep coming or that the usual dynamics didn't apply to them. Note, for example, that intelligent people are more likely to become addicts: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-drugs/
Competitive gamers - or at least the kind that get big Twitch viewership - aren't too far removed from athletes. They're used to the game giving reliable feedback and to getting as many tries as they need to perfect their skills, even if there are moments of high pressure to test them. They're rewarded by chasing a big audience and hustling to put up equally big and obvious leaderboard scores. Gamers have "tight grips" on their domain and optimize themselves heavily towards crushing the game. It's not just an IQ thing, but a personality type.
Finance tends to be the opposite - limited information, long time horizons, optimal risk/rewards by going into poorly understood niches, and permanent failure making loose attachment and adaptability preferable to optimizing. While you can make the competitive gaming mindset work, it's an "attack dog" way of running your life.
And you can see a contrast between session based online gaming - which is what gets most of the Twitch viewers as alluded earlier - and MMOs, in the types of playstyle that "make it" competitively. While MMOs often reward persistent grinds, they can also reward creative ways of redefining the game's goals and mechanics to develop the game in a pro-social direction. You want to be in an MMO with other people who know how to make the game lively, not 1000 angry sweatlords chasing after the same leaderboard stat. So there are typically more ways to measure oneself, and more opportunities to do things like item trading arbitrage, which is directly financial in nature.
>Frankly I don't get why this can't be seen as a legitimate very successful business.
This is going to sound glib, but I honestly think it's because Pinterest hasn't been able to create a comparable (or even marginally similar) business model for its users to capitalize on. Seriously, why isn't Pinterest a big shopping destination? The answer to that will tell us a lot about attitudes toward influencers and e-stars.
OK, so what's involved for a YouTube maker to allow their viewers to single-click something that takes them to a payment page for an item in the video? Is that even a thing that is possible? Didn't YouTube remove the ability for videomakers to add clickable hotspots to their videos?
IIRC you had to crack the top 2000 to hit $50k in a year, although I don't think the data showed streaming hours per year so it's hard to know how many earned something close to a living wage.
Should be noted the leak only contained money earned directly through twitch. But most income from bigger streamers is coming by other means and external services. Though, there is some correlation, so the twitch-only numbers can be still be used to make an educated guess. After all, if you are not making significant money via twitch, it also means your community is usually too small to bring you money through placements or other money flows.
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 "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella, and even the monetization mechanisms are the same old ones (ads, sponsorships, merchandising). By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate.
Arguably the only noteworthy thing here is that technology changes and companies that embrace innovation will eat the lunches of those that fail to keep up (e.g. Blockbuster). "Everyone wants to work for FAANG" because a good chunk of the entertainment industry money is flowing there.
> 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.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
You've clearly never been to a restaurant in LA or NY. These are chock full of "average Joes" working as bartenders and waitresses just waiting to "make it" in movies, tvs, commercials.
Many of the top twitch streamers have legitimate "skill", it's just not the skill you might be referring to in classic entertainment. For example "360 no scope sniper kills" might be the equivalent of "funny one liner quips".
I think you're blurring some lines. I don't imagine Ben Levin (a friend of the much more famous Adam Neely) is a millionaire, and I certainly don't imagine either of them are anywhere on the same level as someone like MrBeast, who actually employs a crew much like a TV show might.
It certainly is as easy as ever to get started, but I think this idea that anyone can just pick up an iphone camera and become a millionaire is a bit disingenuous. As the article alludes, it does take effort, sacrifice and probably a healthy dose of luck to get somewhere in the industry, especially with how crowded it has become.
I don't know Ben Levin, but IIRC MrBeast did started as the average Joe and just grew big. And yes, of course the lines do blur over time. If the new creators become big, they start stepping into the realms of professionality and are beginning cooperations with old industry, creating content for the new and old spaces. But they usually still have the average joe-vibes, because that's how people grew with them, how they see and remember them. But also because they continue maintaining this vibes, as this is their habit of working.
> but I think this idea that anyone can just pick up an iphone camera and become a millionaire is a bit disingenuous.
Obviously not everyone can do that, but this is how almost everyone from the new industry started. I would say, it's simply the difference in culture, between old industry professionals trained schools and such, and the self learners of the new industry. Though, old industry is now moving in this space too, so it will change with time.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
Absolutely, provably false.
It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do. Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
It also takes a high level of creativity in order to come up with new ideas for streams, keep the audience engaged while playing the same game for hundreds of hours on end. This means doing giveaways, interacting with the audience without offending them, planning contests, negotiating advertising deals with game-makers for promo-streams, etc. etc.
It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job. Most people would burn-out at their rate, and a lot actually do.
Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends. This the skill ceiling for "barely any special skill" people. If they stream a game that just came out, they may break 10 viewers once in a while. That's about it.
> It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do.
Well, that's disputable. Most content-sources are delivered externally, in form of games and stuff they can react too. It's not like they sit there and think up something fresh by themselves for 8 hours a day. Though, yes, they have some naturally skill in socializing which they hone over time. But still I would not say it goes beyond the skill of any other natural socializer which exists in any community.
> Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
Which is most of the time not done by them. Usually they pay people for this. And to be fair, Videos of streamers are usually not really masterpieces either. They are optimized versions of their streaming-content. A good youtube-creator has significant more skill there. They occasionally also create far higher quality of content than most streamers.
> It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job.
How many streamers do you actually know? Well scheduled is not really what I would call most streams I've seen.
> Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
If you are a fulltime-streamer, earning money, then they pretty much all get help to some degree.
> Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends.
Not really. They are many dedicated hardworking people with similar skill-levels even on the lowest levels. Success in streaming depends far more on luck than skill. Though, luck is also a skill in some way, so hard to say...
But the skills I was talking about are not the ones you are getting naturally but being alive or just doing stuff long enough to acquire them. Obviously if you stream long enough you get a bunch of skills and knowledge automatically, which any non-streamer is missing yet. But that is nothing special.
Special is stuff not everyone has or can acquire on it's own. Like a professional who went through a long professional training, reaching a level of quality a normal selfmade-streamer never can reach. Or someone which a career outside of streaming. There are more and more people like that hitting the platforms. Many entertainers with decade-long careers came in the pandemia to twitch and youtube, searching for new playgrounds and displaying skills which leaves any big established streamer in the dust.
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
What's your evidence for this? I don't watch a ton of streaming, but to me it looks hard to do well. If they're truly average people, how do you explain the big differences in popularity?
> They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill.
This is not true. It is no more true for streaming then for acting, hosting tv show or entertaining in bar via magic tricks or playing music. The ability to produce entertaining streams is a separate skill. Not just in game skill.
> This is something which never happened before, not at this scale.
At the time when live music was a thing, there were definitely few thousands musicians able to live from it. Which is as large scale as successful streamers seem to be.
> growing from home, with average equipment and average products
Really, no more true then about musical instruments of the past.
In addition to what others have said, I think the fact that people can make a living from very very niche content is novel. Arguably, it works so differently that it could be considered a new sector.
> By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate.
I think you're on point about the platforms, but not about the channels per se. In the past, you basically got to watch what 60-year old guys in the executive suite thought was appropriate, whereas now you can watch a lot more types of stuff. And I think people are wising up to the power platforms had. I think when OnlyFans said they were banning porn, people quite rapidly found new platforms to move to. Building these platforms has also become cheaper and easier, especially in the last 2-5 years IMO.
I mean, cable was already in the niche catering business in the 90s. Gordon Ramsay or Jacques Cousteau or Mythbusters are all quite niche IMHO. I'd be willing to acknowledge that the existence of gaming/mukbang/etc content creators nowadays is merely the entertainment industry catching up with the fact that the world is a lot more vast (and dare I say mundane) than TV would have you believe.
As for platform power and user choice, I think people have a misconception about how much "power" they have, considering that search results and recommendations are entirely at the mercy of the companies that provide them and they're very much aggregated by user profiles, much like cable had "hundreds of options" that are in actuality largely curated to target audiences.
There are a variety of niche old videos that I can no longer find on youtube. The long tail does disappear for no rhyme or reason (actually, if you understand the logistics of live/cold storage and the scale at which youtube operates at, it totally makes sense). It certainly isn't like the napster days where you could in fact find that one ultra rare file that only one person in the world was seeding.
As for content creator mobility, I don't consider twoset's presence on tiktok any more novel than hollywood getting into home video. Content creators and distributors interests' don't always align and there has never been an actual monopoly on distribution channels, even despite the existence of large media conglomerates. It's just the individual players that are different, IMHO.
yes, it's basically strips gate-keepers from parts of the entertainment industry.
Through it's still the entertainment industry as in: It requires a mixture of skill, hard work and luck to even just get to the point of earning more then just your basic-living expanses with it.
Through we also have seen such a disruption in the music industries where with modern music services people can reach some degree of success without any deals with any large publishers (through it's not easy).
That is partially true but not entirely. Twitch still has a somewhat strict TOS and regularly bans streamers. The audience is not always allowed to watch what they want. I'm guessing this is because Twitch needs to be advertiser friendly.
Youtube/Social Media has removed the filters and gatekeeping that happened in the legacy media. Of course there is a lot of noise. But what are the odds of a young MKBHD, DrDisrespect, Linus, etc, etc getting their own show in legacy media? Zero to none because we would've never heard about them.
Its glorious to see people who are truly brilliant at what they do getting a shot at the audience and owning everything they do. Its not just Twitch Streamers and 20 something influencers. There is a deep world of niche experts opening up all sorts of interesting topics to everyone and the best get to stand front and center.
My recent fav is Benn Jordan who breaks down a lot of the challenges of being an independent musician in a world of streaming. He recently did an incredible piece on how a NY Times reporter used his credentials to scam hundreds of musicians.
If you mean Linus from LTT, then wasn't he involved with some tech show which was "more legacy media-ish"?
But either-way, it's not really that legacy media has a lot of gatekeepers which are a mixture of "stuck in the past", "focused on questionable qualifications" and/or "not-impartial/corrupt".
I guess it's not surprising that such which benefit from being (with modern tech) unnecessary middle man and/or benefit from corruption are not happy about losing power and potentially becoming obsolete.
Linus got his start doing product review videos for NCIX which was an online computer hardware shop up here in Canada. He had a fairly severe disagreement about the future of the company (his idea was to compete against amazon with kiosk-style brick and mortar with minimal inventory) so he went independent with his videos. It wasn't really a traditional media thing. NCIX died a couple years ago.
Big corporations are paying more than ever, in addition to surging stock prices for even the biggest of companies, so working at a trillion dollar company is more lucrative than most startups. It did not always used to be that way.
Society is finding ways to value a wider range of talents. Different people are good at different things and, unfortunately, only a subset of those things are valued in the economy.
These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it.
I can't remember the quote but Warren Buffett once said that the only reason he is a billionaire is that he was born at the right time, with the right gender (back when women weren't allowed to do much), and with the right talents.
Valuing a wider range of talents allows more people to participate in the economy. Crypto for example allows developers to inject little bits of economy into apps. Perhaps in the future someone can make a living creating really good cat memes instead of a deadend job that is basically useless anyways.
If that last sentence offended you I'd suggest you checkout the book "Bullshit Jobs".
>These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it.
People have been making money from e-sports for a long time, at least two decades. it's not a new thing. The new platforms however allow gamers to reach large audiences without having to join a major gaming league.
The challenge is that many of them have unsustainable always-on relationships with their audience that seriously burn them out. Sure folks should be free to do what they want with their life but remember they're not the only ones getting the benefit, they're feeding a bunch of social and merchandising platforms that make big $ on their backs - so the question becomes, what responsibility does the platform have towards the health of its creators?
Yes, the new thing is the emergence of mega corporations that profit from platforms that are essentially manufacturing workaholics. Freewill notwithstanding, exploitative incentives are a real thing...
There's at least a potential moral responsibility (yes pls spare snark about banks and morals), and in some countries it can be a legal one, see eg emergence of the "right to disconnect"
Why is it laudable? Sure, we shouldn't be jealous of successful people, but why go to the other extreme? It surely won't help you have an unbiased stance on the phenomenon.
Exactly. Making money is fine as long as it is done in a moral and ethical way. Women showing their bodies on twitch and others so guys can drool over them? No thanks.
What's unethical about that? I don't participate in either side of the market, so maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like a pretty clear service-for-money deal, with consenting adults on all sides and transparent revenue models.
People are generally upset when people succeed with evil deeds. And those new millionaires are often walking a very fine line between good and evil. The amount of trash they sell and scams they do is insane. And even the good ones still play on psychological mechanism, which can be questionable.
Not saying that we should despise them all by default, but one should be very aware of the mechanism and plays of those people and not blindly accept everything. It's an entertaining space, but also a dangerous one. And that too many young people fuel this industry is a problem IMHO.
> It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms.
Please don’t lump content creators in with crypto and dot bombs. The folks creating content on streaming platforms are providing entertainment and putting in real time doing a job. Equating them to what were/are more or less Ponzi schemes isn’t fair to them at all.
I don't see it that way. HN is many different things to many different people. Sure, there are a large number or corporate workers on HN, but given the number of people employed at the top 5 tech companies alone that shouldn't be a surprise.
But there are other substantial areas of interest and overlap: the creatives / makers, the one person businesses, the SMBs (both owner/operators and employees), the start-ups (founders, co-workers), the people pushing some agenda or other (those can be quite annoying) and finally the trolls and even some griefers, though the latter two groups usually find their accounts very short lived (with some regrettable exceptions).
HN has gotten large enough that it is no longer a niche player, but still small enough that it hasn't reached the 'everybody's on it' stage.
But I don't see that 'unwarranted hate for new ventures and disruptive industries'. What you do get is a crowd that isn't going to roll over right away at the first sign of a 'new thing'. In that sense we are probably becoming a bit jaded, having seen 25 years of one new thing after another.
> 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
Yes, that's literally it. This is the proper use of the term hater.
> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing
Also agree. I liked HN better years ago. When I was younger.
> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day?
There's envy involved but I do think a large contributing factor is also the fact that what streamers and influencers and the like do, and what their "influencees" do, tends to very much lean towards being very mindless. It's like celebrity worship, except there's this "they're just like you and me!" aspect to it that feels incredibly disingenuous.
Instead of going out and doing things, you have people sitting on their butts watching someone else sit on their butts and do that stuff. Instead of people bettering themselves and going out and getting a girlfriend, you have people paying to pretend those lewd photos of some random girl who mentioned your username on a stream once because you tipped her which means she totally knows you exist and is basically your girlfriend, were taken just for you.
On top of that one of the main goals for these people is to get you to buy products from their sponsors. They're like the used car salesmen who try to buddy up to you and flatter you so you'll buy one of their cars. Except people know used car salesmen are bullshitting them. And people know celebrities aren't like you and me. People connect to streamers and influencers and spend more time worshiping them on a different level that feels unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think they provide some benefits to society. You can say that these sort of people help others feel like part of a family or whatever, and helps those who have a hard time getting a girlfriend feel better. On the other hand, you could also just point to, for example, the suicide rates which have been trending upward pretty steadily, especially starting with the prevalence of smartphones and such. Or the fact that antidepressant usage has essentially doubled in the past two decades.
Overall, to me, it all just feels like a trend in the wrong direction.
I’m sure there are plenty of incoherent criticisms and not a small amount of envy at play, but there are more serious traditions of thought that are negative towards “culture industry,” writ large.
Yeah i agree, twitch and youtube are producing a new type of celebrity where the content can be created by anyone. Its build your own content, create your own community and do it all yourself. This is disrupting the old entertainment industry where you needed many well connected people to connect you to the audience, and your content was reviewed heavily by ‘experts’ before production.
The content is easier to produce due to technology, and this is personal opinion but its way better than what was made by television studios etc.
> 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.
You provide no explanation as to why we should be lauding them. Or are you implying that because someone is a millionaire then we should automatically laud them? Is that what late stage capitalism looks like?
The output is not fixed. An economic system with a different distribution of resources, or different taxes and import restrictions can have a better outcome, or more economic output
I agree with everything you said except FAANG. To keep with the corporatist shill culture it is now technically MANGA instead of FAANG with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta.
The word "switch" kind of implies that it is zero sum; they're either watching one thing, or another. Entertainers and companies compete to monopolize attention.
“ But as a gig worker for a media empire, even a successful streamer like Tyler has a livelihood that’s inherently unstable — without insurance, unions, sick days, retirement funds or hope for a sustainable career.”
That’s funny. He has earned more in a year than many in a decade. Million a year and it’s unstable. What makes you think the job of a software engineer is stable! He is skilled in entertainment. He will find a way.
This sounds like a bad way to live, and I'm sure it is. But, I wonder if a similarly anxious narrative could be written about the average PM at a startup, or Amazon delivery person, or Uber driver, or really anyone with a demanding job that consumes as much of your time as it can. It seems like being swatted and harassed online are the more unique perils of being a content creator, but the 10-hour stressful days are not, and many people would probably trade their 10-hour stressful days at $40k-$160k a year for 10-hour stressful days at $2 million a year if they could.
I keep reading these exposé’s about how difficult and damaging some career is. I rock climb and everyone is obsessed with shining light on eating disorders and how thin athletes need to be. No one is writing about plumbers having bad backs and knees, or construction workers having lung problems. It’s just oh “Kim Kardashian is stressed because people say mean things on Instagram.”
It’s dumb, yes life is hard and will grind you down. If your lucky you make enough money to step away while your still healthy and relatively young.
T1 is a very extreme example. He seems to have no life, he plays the same game for 10-12 hours/day, he is pretty toxic, he seems to have few other interests and no social life...that is fine, he is an astute businessman but most other streamers aren't doing this. They play variety, they do IRL, they have social lives, they take breaks. Even xQc, another streamer who is notorious for 20+ hour streams every week, plays variety and goes outside...sometimes (he recently did an IRL stream at Universal).
So I think it is like a lot of entertainment: the job can be intense, there is often little separation between personal and private but the pay is generally pretty good. Even on Twitch which really struggles with promoting smaller streamers, there are people far down the chain earning $50k/year with relatively small communities. Is that better than a startup? No. But not everyone can move to SF or go to college either.
I don't think being swatted or harassed is that common either. If you are a big streamer and you leak where you live, then maybe...but it doesn't happen as much as it used to (xQc got swatted repeatedly this year, and someone broke into his house...it does still happen).
Also, Twitch chat is toxic but most of the negative comments are not serious. I understand why normies wouldn't understand that but part of the fun for (some) streamers is battling with chat. It isn't a very serious place.
> 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.
I'm happy that he's making money, especially since it sounds like he didn't have it easy as a kid.
However it's a bit sad to me that this is the successful end state of the streamer economy. His job is uniquely voluntary. He plays what he wants to play. People tune in and pay him if they want to. And somehow the result is that if he wants to stay at the top of this world he's trapped in that chair for unreasonable spans while people drop by to either praise or abuse him.
If this is the natural evolution of celebrity-fan relationships I think it reflects way worse on the fans than the celebrity. This is what we demand for the sake of our entertainment.
I find it hard to sympathize for the poor plight of the $200,000/month healthcare-less twitch streamer working 2 more hours a day than the average person. Was this article written entirely to provoke outrage or is there some oppression I’m missing?
Riot has been taking Tyler1 seriously and even had him voice over for their preseason announcements. He's been collaborating with Riot a lot so not just a puny streamer.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We ban that sort of account because we're trying for a different quality of discussion here.
Yes, I honestly believe the donation model (which is the big share of their revenue) shows a glimmer of hope in capitalism. I wish for a future where it's norm not only for streamers but also companies to have the majority of their revenue come from donations.
I think, for the majority of streamers, the way to set expenses is by looking at long term subscribers rather than day-to-day donations - those donos can fund fun things but you're going to want to try and keep your life expenses carried by the regular subscription income. A lot of the people who have gotten successful doing this have endured extremely lean times when they were trying to break into a decent sized audience - every streamer I've ever heard talk about the financial side of things plans things extremely conservatively.
Aren't subscriptions basically just a monthly donation? What do I get for subscribing apart from the icon in front of my name in chat and possibly a shoutout?
Absolutely nothing! But subscribers tend to be more reliable about re-subscribing.
When it comes to twitch you're never really buying anything concrete with your cash. You're mostly buying attention or a reply - sometimes you'll buy game effects or challenges, but usually you're just abstractly throwing money at them to keep the content coming.
Because they entertain, making them primarily entertainers. We should reserve labels like "creators" for people who are actually building things, not streaming their lives on camera for an audience.
Semantics. If your bar for calling someone a "creator" is that low, then nearly everyone is a creator in what they do. But we have different classifications because applying one label to most of the population is not very useful.
