For another streaming “ecosystem”, I have some familiarity with five Youtubers who have posted a lot of Rimworld videos; Rimworld is a single-player game and there are no tournaments. The most popular one, Ambiguous Amphibian, is extremely entertaining, and is also clearly the worst player—I see him make plenty of mildly substantial mistakes even in recent videos. The rest are all very good players and it’s hard to say who’s the best. Pete Complete, definitely the second most popular, has a spectacular British narrating voice. The other three have similar subscriber counts, and the view counts on their Rimworld videos vary widely, so it’s hard to compare exactly; anyway, to introduce them, Francis John has the gleeful enthusiasm (and, seemingly, the general personality (note this isn’t a bad thing)) of a boy playing with his toys; Rhadamant is somewhat entertaining, but his main attraction is being serious and competent while playing through interesting or difficult scenarios; and xwynns/”Crusha of Mans” projects a very “hyper” personality that is generally entertaining.
All five present most of their videos as challenge runs of some kind; the most popular type is “start with no tech and no resources in an extreme hot/cold climate at highest difficulty level”. All five players at least talk about strategy and what they’re planning; Ambiguous Amphibian and xwynns are the most likely to talk about silly non-strategy things (although xwynns’ final series was also one of the most technically impressive). Francis John is the only one who goes as far as creating entire videos dedicated to teaching strategy or game concepts, which he calls “tutorial nuggets”, wherein he uses dev mode to construct scenarios illustrating whatever lesson he has in mind, or to run large-scale experiments (like creating 100 characters and 100 enemies, dressing the characters in different kinds of armor, saving the file and letting them fight repeatedly, and collecting the results in a spreadsheet). Francis John’s day job is apparently network engineering.
What can we derive from this? It’s possible for “skill and teaching skill” to do well, when it happens to co-occur with charisma. Skill does help, because it lets you do more impressive things as a streamer. But the tradeoff of improving skill vs improving entertainment does seem weighted towards the latter. And dedicated “teaching” efforts, among the top streamers, are mostly done by one guy who seems intrinsically motivated (and has a probably-well-paying day job). It’s possible that these effects are stronger for one-player games, of course.
For another streaming “ecosystem”, I have some familiarity with five Youtubers who have posted a lot of Rimworld videos; Rimworld is a single-player game and there are no tournaments. The most popular one, Ambiguous Amphibian, is extremely entertaining, and is also clearly the worst player—I see him make plenty of mildly substantial mistakes even in recent videos. The rest are all very good players and it’s hard to say who’s the best. Pete Complete, definitely the second most popular, has a spectacular British narrating voice. The other three have similar subscriber counts, and the view counts on their Rimworld videos vary widely, so it’s hard to compare exactly; anyway, to introduce them, Francis John has the gleeful enthusiasm (and, seemingly, the general personality (note this isn’t a bad thing)) of a boy playing with his toys; Rhadamant is somewhat entertaining, but his main attraction is being serious and competent while playing through interesting or difficult scenarios; and xwynns/”Crusha of Mans” projects a very “hyper” personality that is generally entertaining.
All five present most of their videos as challenge runs of some kind; the most popular type is “start with no tech and no resources in an extreme hot/cold climate at highest difficulty level”. All five players at least talk about strategy and what they’re planning; Ambiguous Amphibian and xwynns are the most likely to talk about silly non-strategy things (although xwynns’ final series was also one of the most technically impressive). Francis John is the only one who goes as far as creating entire videos dedicated to teaching strategy or game concepts, which he calls “tutorial nuggets”, wherein he uses dev mode to construct scenarios illustrating whatever lesson he has in mind, or to run large-scale experiments (like creating 100 characters and 100 enemies, dressing the characters in different kinds of armor, saving the file and letting them fight repeatedly, and collecting the results in a spreadsheet). Francis John’s day job is apparently network engineering.
What can we derive from this? It’s possible for “skill and teaching skill” to do well, when it happens to co-occur with charisma. Skill does help, because it lets you do more impressive things as a streamer. But the tradeoff of improving skill vs improving entertainment does seem weighted towards the latter. And dedicated “teaching” efforts, among the top streamers, are mostly done by one guy who seems intrinsically motivated (and has a probably-well-paying day job). It’s possible that these effects are stronger for one-player games, of course.