So, I’ve been livestreaming on Twitch for a year now. As expected, I’ve seen slow growth of my channel over that time, and generally I’ve been happy with how things have gone. But then there are those weeks when things just don’t quite go your way… When viewers just don’t show up, regardless of the games you play, or how much you hype up your stream on social media.
Sometimes you just have a dead week. I just had one of those weeks. Unfortunately, it was during my 1st Anniversary celebration on Twitch.
To say that was just a bit depressing, let alone frustrating, would be putting it mildly.
Like I said before, though, I get it. Sometimes you just have a bad week. But this was a particularly bad week overall, and couple it with the celebration that frankly… wasn’t… and you have a sad Scormey.
Let’s look at how the week played out:
- Saturday morning, Tenknife and I played some “Trove”, and while the numbers for that were pretty low, as was interaction with viewers, I could kind of understand that. You see, we had a viewer who joined us to play together some, but they brought a geared out, level cap character to play with our low-level characters, and just decimated everything before we could do anything. So it made for a very boring stream, watching us just get ported from dungeon to dungeon, collecting loot and do little else. By the way, we won’t be streaming “Trove” ever again.
- Saturday night I played “Lord of the Rings Online”, as usual, and had a good time with that. Prim and Muck stopped by, as did a few others, and it was a fun stream I think. It was still rather small, in comparison to my usual Saturday livestreams, but I can deal with that. Little did I know that this was going to be the highlight of my week…
- Sunday night I did things a bit differently, because as of midnight on Monday morning was officially my 1st anniversary streaming on Twitch. So I turned the whole night into a multiple-game livestream extravaganza, thinking that would be fun, and maybe bring in a few more viewers than normal. Yeah, about that…
- First we played “Elder Scrolls Online”, which did okay, but not great at all. No viewer interaction, but at least there were a couple of Lurkers (who are always appreciated).
- So I took a brief break, and next started up some “Lord of the Rings Online”, playing my Beornling. While I had a great time, and viewership went up a bit, I did eventually need to stop to eat, but I planned to come back after having my lunch/dinner/whatever you might eat when you stay up all night.
- When I came back, I decided to play some “Rift”, which usually does okay in the early-morning hours, like this was. To say this was not the case this time, would be a huge understatement! I only played this for an hour or so, but pulling an average of one viewer – which would have been me, monitoring my stream to make sure it was okay – was damn bad. I mean, “Punch me in the gut”-level bad. I had a good time playing the game, but apparently no one wanted to see “Rift” at all, which is weird, even for a low population game like that.
Anyway, I cancelled the fourth stream that morning, which would have been “Maplestory 2”, a game I’ve never streamed before, because I couldn’t take the risk of having yet another horrible stream. I know people say “Rift” is a dead game, but it really isn’t. You see, after the stream I logged into the Faeblight server, and I found crowded hubs, so there are people playing, obviously. They just aren’t watching the game on Twitch.
I get it, this probably sounds like 100% Whining from Your Favorite Red Panda, and I will admit that it is. My twitch channel is still doing fine overall, this was just a one week slump, nothing to really worry about. But at the same time, I still will worry, because I have put my heart and soul into this for over a year now. Let’s be clear here: I’m not saying I should be pulling Partner-type numbers, not even close. But at the same time, it frankly hurts to throw yourself out there for your entire weekend – which I do, every damn week, at the same damn times – and get little to no response.
I do have a few loyal friends on Twitch, who I greatly appreciate. I wouldn’t be an Affiliate without Prim, BigEdMustafa, Muckshifter, Ooger, and others, but I appreciate every single person who comes by my stream, really I do. I guess I’m just a bit burnt out, prancing about like a dancing monkey for most of my weekends for a straight year, and I find myself still stressing over staying above the three viewer average needed to become an Affiliate. Yes, I know it generally takes upwards of a year of “inactivity” to lose Affiliate, but I am not the sort to take what I consider ‘backsliding’ lying down. Once I got that average, I feel I need to maintain – or, better yet exceed – that average.
Maybe that’s just me?
Anyway, I got to the point that I began considering leaving Twitch entirely, especially on Monday morning. The main reason I didn’t is that would be a waste of the entire last year, and I’d miss the cool folks I’ve met there. But something needs to change, and change it will:
- First of all, do you like LOTRO? Because you’ll be getting almost entirely LOTRO content on my channel from now on! I’ll be playing other games off-stream, but LOTRO will be my primary game for Twitch.
- Next, I am going to rethink my streaming times, again. The Saturday morning stream isn’t going as well as I’d hoped, so maybe I need to take a nap after I get home from work, then stream in the early afternoon (1-2pm to start)? Or maybe I need to stream on weekday mornings? The latter of those ideas didn’t work out so well for me before, but I could give it another try, I guess.
- There is no spoon.
- I need to focus on being more engaging, trying to tell more jokes, maybe even sing more silly songs? I don’t know. But I have to do something to drive engagement with viewers.
So, that’s that. I’ll stop whining now.
