When asked who kids idolize, most of us will think of celebrities or sports stars. However, in the age of the Internet, that’s no longer such a sure thing. With the speed and power of modern broadband technology, anyone can upload their own videos to the Internet and become an overnight sensation. For example, Singaporean popstar JJ Lin, winner of the 2014 Golden Melody Award for Best Mandarin Male Singer, has accrued 360,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel since 2006; meanwhile a young woman two years out of college known only as “Annie” has, in her three years running a gaming channel, gathered more than 500,000 subscribers.
Is it really so easy for these gamers to rake in the big bucks? Can anyone just start a job playing video games?
More than just a game
These gaming videos, known as “Let’s Plays,” involve a person recording him- or herself playing a video game, coupling it with commentary and sometimes graphics, and uploading it to the net. Then, through video comments, the audience can interact with the “Let’s Player” (LPer) and make their voices heard.
LPers’ receive a share of the advertising revenue generated by their videos, based on viewer counts and traffic. Or to put it simply, the more people watch, the more the LPers make.
Annie is one of Taiwan’s more popular LPers, and even won YouTube’s “Most Creative” award for 2014. “Once I won that award,” she says, “my mother finally stopped nagging at me to get a ‘real’ job. Now she even counts herself as a fan!”
With many people curious about how much LPers make, Annie humbly comments that she doesn’t make all that much, but it’s still more than the average recent college graduate, which is why she decided to make it a full-time job.
“A lot of people leave comments about how they want to start doing Let’s Plays too, but it’s actually not that easy,” she says. Since LPers make their money based on subscriber count and traffic, if you don’t have more than 100,000 subscribers it can be a real struggle to make ends meet.
“Every big LPer today had to start at zero and gradually build a name for themselves,” says Annie. “There’s a lot of hard work behind the scenes that the audience never gets to see.” When she started out, she would spend about two hours actually playing the games, and then another six to eight hours on editing. And when hosting a live stream, if her computer crashes, her microphone stops working, or any other such problems arise, the viewers will start leaving. On top of all that, she has to put up with attacks and insults from people online, which used to get so overwhelming it would put her off streaming for days at a time.
But ultimately, when trying to make a name for yourself as an LPer, the most important thing is the content of your videos and whether or not they can bring in the viewers and subscribers.
What’s involved in a Let’s Play?
Look at the game Annie most frequently plays for videos, Minecraft. The game is about exploring an unknown world, mining materials, collecting resources, and building your own house, farm, castle, or whatever takes your fancy. Its lack of a plot means there’s freedom to do whatever you want, but if LPers do that, they risk losing the interest of their viewers. For that reason, Annie has not only created her own world, but also a narrative, and even set up a system for viewers to leave messages for her, from which she chooses three at random to decide what challenge to tackle next.
Over the course of ten episodes and almost a full year, Annie took on 30 of the weird and wonderful suggestions made by her viewers. One such proposition was that Annie should not only seek out some of the most valuable mineral in the game, diamond, but that she should then throw it all into lava, destroying it. After almost an hour, she finally struck diamond, and then immediately went and dumped it into nearby lava. “I felt like I wanted to cry,” she says, but that momentary pain successfully boosted her viewership, and ultimately became one of the contributing factors to her winning her YouTube award.
Some LPers are even able to translate one of their most important traits—their voices—into side work. Annie, for example, has an excellent singing voice, and when she does live streams, she often gets requests from the audience. Last year, she and some friends worked together to release a single, and got over 3 million hits on YouTube, more than many professional singers. Another popular streamer, Chang Chia-hang—known online as Asiagod—has earned fans for his exaggerated, forthright way of speaking, and has even been asked to be a commentator on several e-sports competitions, creating a healthy side job.
Once an LPer or streamer has reached a level of recognition, they can then use that to create opportunities to work with sponsors, doing things like showcasing new games and products or promoting new gaming platforms. Some streamers and LPers even get sponsorships from hardware manufacturers or set up their own teams to help boost the frequency of their videos, as well as working on diversifying their careers.
How big are streaming and LPs?
If some people being able to make this a paying job isn’t enough to convince you of just how big this phenomenon is, let’s look at some data. According to the world’s largest livestreaming platform, the Amazon-owned Twitch, in 2015 their monthly user numbers have grown every month; already they have reached 60 million users, with Taiwanese users accounting for some 2 million of them. This success spurred Google to create a separate YouTube Gaming platform, hoping to get a piece of the pie. And it’s not only multinational companies trying to plug into the streaming craze—Taiwan has its own platform, in the form of LIVEhouse.in.
“Streaming isn’t all that difficult technologically, it’s more about capturing viewers and deepening content,” says co-founder of LIVEhouse.in Keynes Cheng. And behind the boom in streaming “is the fact that everyone believes that fewer and fewer people are watching TV anymore.”
Two decades ago, anyone following a TV series had to be in front of their screen at the right time to catch it, but today that’s less and less the case as video on demand (VOD) takes over. Whether it’s news, entertainment, education, drama, or even films, virtually anything that’s on TV is now viewable on the Internet. “Almost half of those under 35 rarely, if ever, actually watch television,” says Cheng. But what has really helped streaming take hold, he argues, is the rapid rise of both online video technologies and social media.
Finding a spot on the battlefield
In the fight for market share, each platform has its own strategies. The better-funded platforms are constantly making upgrades, improving image quality and streaming speed. Twitch’s massive traffic and revenue sharing are its big selling points for streamers, and it has plans for further growth into the future. Aspiring newcomers like LIVEhouse.in, meanwhile, try to compete through things like giving streamers 100% of advertising revenue generated while not levying any charges. In this way, they hope to win over the online audience.
“Honestly, right now we’re not even thinking about making money,” says Cheng.
With the bloody fight over the streaming market continuing, what do streamers themselves think?
“Everyone needs something distinctive, and if you don’t have it, you better get to creating it,” says Annie. While there are plenty of female streamers, ones like Annie, who aren’t trying to leverage their image and appearance, and are quite happy to burst out laughing on mike, are few and far between. This is part of what has made Annie, who never shows her face on camera, so popular with her audience.
Another way to go is humor. If your videos are funny, it doesn’t matter whether you’re actually any good at video games, the audience will still be interested.
The final, and most difficult, way of getting established is through social media. Many streamers try to work around those times when the largest audience will be available, so daytime is quiet time until most of the students get home from school around 5 or 6 p.m.
Streaming and Let’s Plays have transformed video games from time-wasters for antisocial layabouts into a viable, and desirable, way to turn a hobby into many a youngster’s dream job.
League of Legends is currently the most popular video game for e-sports, as well as being the most watched game on streams. Two LoL teams from Taiwan made it into the final eight at this year’s World Championship. This photo shows Taiwanese team AHQ e-Sports Club competing in Europe. (courtesy of Riot Games)
One streamer, Annie, has become so popular that not only have her fans made her an avatar, even her cat has fans!
Taiwan’s best-known streamer, known as Asiagod (right), has begun branching out from video games by creating variety shows, cultivating a more diverse audience. (courtesy of LIVEhouse.in)
Live-action show Escape, in which a group’s attempts to complete an “escape the room” challenge are streamed live, with different special guests appearing each week and viewers able to interact live online. The picture shows a team in the middle of trying to solve one of the challenge’s riddles.
From e-sports to live streams, the video game industry has grown well beyond its origins. Here, crowds of fans gathered to cheer on Taiwan’s representatives. (photo by Chuang Kung-ju)
