The esports industry is rapidly growing despite the obstacles it has to overcome. And this growth creates an excellent opportunity for people who enjoy streaming games. But as you can imagine, it’s not exactly easy to succeed in this niche. This guide will give you an idea of what you need to do to turn your streaming dream into a reality.
Tools for Streaming
If you want to succeed as an esports streamer, you will need a good PC, an excellent microphone, a great camera, basic knowledge of OBS Studio (or other streaming software), a Twitch / YouTube account, and so on. Make sure you spend your budget wisely because the costs add up.
We often see pro players streaming carelessly and having thousands of viewers. The reason why they can afford to do that is simple: they’re already famous. But you cannot do what they do. You’ll need to be 10 times more professional if you want to succeed.
The Essential Ingredients for Success
If you want to stream regularly and make a living doing that, you need to treat it as a job. Some people will gather a large audience simply by being skillful. Others because they’ve been a member of a professional team for a while and have gained fame in high-level tournaments. Others simply have a charismatic personality or the ability to entertain a crowd. And others are relatable as gamers. They might not play in the top tier, but you enjoy following their progress and their struggle to reach the top. In a lot of ways, they’re just like you.
Being Skillful
You can only become skillful in one way: by studying and playing a game for a long period of time. In some games, you might reach mastery in just a few hundred hours. But in esports like Dota 2, you need at least 10,000. If you haven’t been playing the game you want to stream for at least 3 – 4 years, you won’t be skilled enough to impress an audience. It doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t succeed. It simply means that you can’t succeed by being skillful.
Being an Entertainer
If you have a captivating way of presenting yourself, you can use that to succeed as a streamer. Perhaps you have a great voice, a sense of humor, the ability to tell interesting stories, or simply excellent reasoning skills that you can use to analyze the games you are playing or other topics your audience might be interested in.
If your strategy for succeeding as a streamer is to entertain people, make sure you prepare for your audience. The way you dress could be important, the subjects you talk about, and even the music that runs in the background. Everything that puts people in a good mood can help.
Great entertainers understand that people are searching for something invisible that gives them a bit more hope, a bit more strength to carry on, a bit more wisdom, and so on. If you can provide that for them, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a highly skilled player or not at a particular game, because your audience will follow you for a completely different reason.
One thing that you can do as an entertainer if you’re skillful enough is to provide regular analyses with predictions for upcoming professional tournaments. Such events offer superb betting opportunities and you might increase your audience if you can provide such content.
Being on a Pro Team
This requires you to be skillful but has the added benefit that you gain a lot of exposure. Every time you compete in front of a large crowd, more and more people start to follow you on social media. And that makes it easy for you to start streaming because you already have an audience.
One trick that you can use to get the opportunity to play for a pro team is to create one yourself. If you’re skilled enough to compete at a high level and have formed friendships with people who are in a similar situation, simply ask them to start training with you and then participate in qualifiers for important events.
Being Relatable
If you’re on a journey to the top and your strategy is to get people to follow your ups and downs, make sure you tell your story in a compelling way. Because your audience will follow you the same way it follows a protagonist in a movie. Character development, character backstory, good days, bad days, and other things like that make up a great story. So don’t neglect them.