So it’s a new year (Yay!), and so far, things are going pretty damn well for Everyone’s Favorite Red Panda. Sure, there are problems here or there, but things are going well enough, and I’m quite pleased!
First of all, while my Razer headset bit the dust a few weeks ago, I have a new, better pair of headphones (Lyx-Pro OEH-10)! These are open back in design, so they get more air to my ears, making them much easier to wear on long Livestreams. Problem solved!
I have noted a rather irritating trend with our podcast, “Pixels & Dice”, though. For the first time in a year or so, we failed to hit 1000+ downloads, and I’m not happy with that at all. Beoulus and I will just have to work harder to be entertaining with the next set of shows we record, coming in February. But if the downloads continue to drop, I might just reconsider whether or not having a weekly podcast is even worth it anymore.
So, last weekend I had a rather interesting set of Livestreams on Twitch. I got RetroArch set up on my laptop, and even Livestreamed a couple of different classic games, which was quite a bit of fun. I’m currently having a bit of trouble getting RetroArch to play nice with OBS again, but once that is resolved, I expect I’ll stream at least once classic retro game every weekend, if I have the time.
But that wasn’t what was so cool about last weekend, although it was part of it. You see, early Monday morning, I was going to stream some Nintendo GameCube games, but that’s when RetroArch stopped working with OBS, so it had to be cancelled. Instead, I ran an emergency stream of “Lord of the Rings Online”, which then proceeded to have technical issues itself. But in the end, when all the dust was settled, I ended up having the best livestream in terms of viewers I’ve had in months! Great conversations, plenty of joking around with Chat Folk, and I took a ‘broken’ livestream, and turned it into an 11 viewer average!
I know, I know… Having an 11 average for viewers isn’t really all that good, as far as most streamers are concerned. But as someone who generally averages around 6.5 viewers, an 11 average – in the dead of night for me, but early Monday morning for east coast and European viewers – is damn cool!
Anyway, if you haven’t noticed by now, I’ve changed up the website quite a bit this week. One of the major changes involves the new Poll option on the right side of the main page. I’m currently using this feature to allow my viewers to choose which game they’d like me to play on Saturday mornings. Sure, I don’t provide a bunch of options on the Poll, but that is on purpose. If people choose “Other” as their game of choice, I will pick some game that isn’t on the Poll to play.
This Poll will also affect the Sunday night stream. While the Saturday night stream remains devoted to LOTRO, Sunday will be used to play a game from the Poll, as shown below:
- If “Neverwinter” is chosen for the Saturday stream, I’ll play “Rift” on Sunday.
- If “Rift” is chosen for Saturday morning, I’ll play “Neverwinter” on Sunday night.
- If y’all instead choose LOTRO for Saturday morning, I will also play LOTRO on Sunday night (making it a full weekend of LOTRO on the channel).
- Finally, if “Other” is chosen for Saturday, I’ll also play a random game on Sunday night.
I think this is a fair way to determine what I’ll be playing on the Livestream, but it will require audience participation. There will be a new poll of this sort from week to week, as occasionally the game options might change (such as replacing “Neverwinter” for “Guild Wars 2”, for example), but the way the poll is used will remain essentially the same. You can vote up until Midnight on Saturday morning each week, because I need a few hours before the Saturday morning stream to get things arranged.
Anyway, I’ve been livestreaming on Twitch for almost a year now, and I’m pretty stoked to have earned over 200 Follows on the platform over that time. I’m an Affiliate, and while I’m not growing as fast as some streamers, I also don’t stream every day, so that’s fine. I am hoping to make my way to 500 Followers by the end of 2019, and work my way to an average of 10 viewers overall, which I think is completely doable. Sure, these are pretty low goals compared to many streamers, but I think setting realistic goals is in my best interest. I don’t want to focus on numbers over focusing on my audience.
So I guess that’s all I really had to say so far. I hope to blog more this year, instead of just tossing up random clips from my livestreams, but we’ll see how that goes.