Looking at myself, as someone who has done things adjacent to streaming in the past, and who has played a lot of video games at various times in my life, it may be informative to think about the reasons I don’t stream:
The computer I used to record me playing on died, and now I have a new computer which runs a different operating system, and I don’t want to spend the time to get everything set up again. I think there are a good number of things that are relatively easy to do on an ongoing basis, but which involve high enough up-front costs that I don’t do them
I also have a general aversion to installing software on my computer, since my experience seems to be that computer performance is inversely proportional to how much stuff is on it
My understanding is that streaming console games requires extra hardware. While I already have this hardware, this may discourage potential streamers who are first considering streaming
I have mixed feelings about pursuing social status via online media. There’s a part of me that loves these kinds of things for obvious reasons, but I also have three holdups:
Looking for attention feels vain, and I sometimes feel that it makes people perceive me in a way that doesn’t align with who I consider myself to be.
There exist incentives in the space of “content creation” that don’t align with my values, and when I created content in the past, it led me to interact with other creators who didn’t understand why I intentionally ignored these incentives, and pressured me to act in ways that I didn’t endorse
Cancel culture is a thing, and getting popular through online media makes one a target for cancelling. I have clear memories of a creator I respected getting cancelled, and I was very scared by the treatment he got from the mob. I would rather not find myself in such a position, and therefore I am reluctant to put myself in a position where people might readily want to cancel me
My computer is a desktop, and it is located in a different room from where I play video games. Putting aside streaming, I would have no reason to rearrange my setup, and doing so would probably decrease the quality of my experience, both in terms of playing games, and non-gaming related things as well
There’s some amount of expectation to follow a certain schedule when streaming, whereas right now, I can play games whenever I want, and I have no obligation to play at a certain time
There’s some amount of expectation that streamers will put in extra effort to engage with their audience, or otherwise create a more interesting experience for their audience, which means that time spent streaming isn’t perfectly isomorphic to time spent gaming alone.
I don’t think this is a complete list of reasons, but all of these are reasons why I don’t stream even when I’m already spending time playing videogames.
Looking at myself, as someone who has done things adjacent to streaming in the past, and who has played a lot of video games at various times in my life, it may be informative to think about the reasons I don’t stream:
The computer I used to record me playing on died, and now I have a new computer which runs a different operating system, and I don’t want to spend the time to get everything set up again. I think there are a good number of things that are relatively easy to do on an ongoing basis, but which involve high enough up-front costs that I don’t do them
I also have a general aversion to installing software on my computer, since my experience seems to be that computer performance is inversely proportional to how much stuff is on it
My understanding is that streaming console games requires extra hardware. While I already have this hardware, this may discourage potential streamers who are first considering streaming
I have mixed feelings about pursuing social status via online media. There’s a part of me that loves these kinds of things for obvious reasons, but I also have three holdups:
Looking for attention feels vain, and I sometimes feel that it makes people perceive me in a way that doesn’t align with who I consider myself to be.
There exist incentives in the space of “content creation” that don’t align with my values, and when I created content in the past, it led me to interact with other creators who didn’t understand why I intentionally ignored these incentives, and pressured me to act in ways that I didn’t endorse
Cancel culture is a thing, and getting popular through online media makes one a target for cancelling. I have clear memories of a creator I respected getting cancelled, and I was very scared by the treatment he got from the mob. I would rather not find myself in such a position, and therefore I am reluctant to put myself in a position where people might readily want to cancel me
My computer is a desktop, and it is located in a different room from where I play video games. Putting aside streaming, I would have no reason to rearrange my setup, and doing so would probably decrease the quality of my experience, both in terms of playing games, and non-gaming related things as well
There’s some amount of expectation to follow a certain schedule when streaming, whereas right now, I can play games whenever I want, and I have no obligation to play at a certain time
There’s some amount of expectation that streamers will put in extra effort to engage with their audience, or otherwise create a more interesting experience for their audience, which means that time spent streaming isn’t perfectly isomorphic to time spent gaming alone.
I don’t think this is a complete list of reasons, but all of these are reasons why I don’t stream even when I’m already spending time playing videogames.