Hello, I am going to tell my experience in the Twitch environment in the past year or so. The first time and only reason I went to the Twitch site was because of CS:GO tournaments. I played CS:GO for awhile and during Dreamhack Winter, it was giving viewers exclusive case drops. In order to get those drops, the viewers could either watch it through the CS:GO client or link the Steam account to Twitch and watch it from there.
For some odd reason, after the tournament was done for the day, I checked live broadcasts that were on top of CS:GO and summit1g was one of them. He definitely was and is a great player, but more importantly, the way he was interacting with the viewers was what I got attracted to the channel although I never chatted in his chat and a lot of viewers are typing nonstop. Then, I started to dig into deeper to Twitch and started watching other broadcasters.
Being a viewer for about 2-3 months, I decided to give Twitch a shot by trying out myself. My first broadcast was in February 21, 2015 and I decided to play CS:GO. My setup at the time was below average. My computer at the time was a Lenovo G510 laptop stock and a normal Logitech mouse. Additionally, I was using a Logitech G330 as my microphone and a Sony earbuds since the headset was bothering me because I wear glasses. Lastly, I did not have a second monitor and had to use my Nexus 7 to see and talk with viewers.
My first broadcast was not as smooth as I liked to be. Surprisingly, one viewer stopped by and was chatting with me since CS:GO is a heavily saturated game with a lot of broadcasters. Unfortunately, my microphone was not working at all and I did not know how to fix it and had to talk with the viewer through chat. The quality was not the greatest, but it was watchable.
After finishing my first broadcast, I subbed to the Twitch reddit page and read through the starter guide. I learned a lot of the different software that a broadcaster can use and learned more about each software. Additionally, I made an introduction post (before it had the TwitchDB site). A few days later, while I was streaming, a viewer by the name of MrSamKim came to my channel and said that found me through my intro reddit post.
Sam Kim is also a broadcaster and I checked his stream. The first game that I saw him stream was GTA V and although he is not the best at the game, he makes the stream interesting. To this day, I lurk by his stream once in awhile and see the interaction with his viewers and also having fun.
Months have passed and I managed to get a better computer and peripherals, but I was slowly losing motivation. My mentality into streaming at first was to gain success and talk with a lot of viewers after seeing other popular streamers. I slowly lost interest and energy by playing the same game (CS:GO or LoL) by myself. A few days later, I decided to change my mentality by having a goal. The goal was and is to complete my Steam/Origin library and not focus too much on the broadcast aspect of it. This might be a dumb move since I would not get loyal viewers , but if it was not for streaming, I would have not met some of my viewers that I consider as a friend and also completing some games that I would have never thought of touching. Additionally, I now understand both sides of the spectrum (being a viewer and a broadcaster).
aeromentality 