I think it’s like most things - only the top X% are going to have the level of success that people hope for when they get into it. The vast majority break even or lose money.
But you look at someone like Cohh, who streams literally every day, and he doesn’t seem unhappy. I know it’s strenuous work, but at the end of the day he’s doing what he loves and getting paid handsomely for it.
But yeah, quitting your job to become a streamer before you’ve even determined if it’s something you’re good at is a bad idea, like people who go all in (pun intended) as pro poker players because they made some money in a sit-and-go in Reno.
I enjoy watching Cohh, mainly because he seems to enjoy what he does. Also, he makes streaming look easy, like we’re just catching him doing something he’d probably be doing if there were no such thing as Twitch. A good friend of mine has been streaming Dark Souls mainly just so myself and a third friend can watch him struggle along and every so often he’ll just go, ‘OK guys, you need to be quiet for a minute, I need to focus.’ And you can’t do that if you’re a pro, you just roll with it and have to manage to be engaging and also play the game reasonably well. And I’m sure it’s an acquired skill but it’s not something everybody is cut out for, I would think.
This is true, but keep in mind she’s doing something that is, I think, super cutting edge tech right now. I think real-time mocap is in its infancy and has some work to do to achieve the level of fidelity we’re used to.
If the lottery winner put a metric assload of time and development effort into the lottery sure. I hadn’t heard about Codemiko at all until I read the article above, but I came away very impressed.
I had a hard time watching, what is basically a character she plays, for more than a few minutes. Even just watching a high lights video was hard for me. But I could understand the appeal and there was certainly some clever ideas going on.
Yes, she writes and develops her own code for interfacing the mocap + unreal engine. It’s impressive stuff, with no small amount of jank, sure. Being real time though means you can’t go back and smooth and out fix out the bad data.
Yeah, I think a good comparison is perhaps to authors. Anyone can write books, and maybe even sell a few copies, but the vast majority of writers can’t afford to quit their day job. Very few reach the success of Stephen King, JK Rowling, Dan Brown, etc.
I don’t have any statistics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of highly successful authors is similar to the percentage of highly successful Twitch streamers.
Many Japanese vtubers from Hololive use a Neumann KU100 which is $8400 in the USA. The newer American branch is cheaper, I believe they are using $500 mics or so. One of them’s gonna upgrade to an FS Pro II which is $2000.
That’s some serious money to be putting upfront on something not at all a sure thing. I mean sure you can say the same thing about education and some training programs, but I had no idea it could be that much. I mean I knew there were some expensive cameras out there but 20k worth of equipment before having any amount of success… that’s high risk.
Oh she uses Pepe the Frog. I am starting to understand where her fanbase is coming from.
The top American hololiver (it’s a company name) Gawr Gura has grossed $411k in 6 months just from superchats (direct donations). This does not count membership (monthly donations) or youtube ad revenue.
The top Japanese hololiver (actually an American from Georgia who moved to Japan) has grossed almost 1.8 Million dollars in superchat. This stuff is blowing up.
But it’s kind of like sports though right? I mean there is no barrier to entry here except maybe access to debt. A lot will try only a few will be at the top. How many Miko’s that shelled out 20k don’t even have a chance to make that back?
Now I am not really advocating creating fake barriers or anything like that. I am just thinking of how many millions of kids will want to grow up to be rich game players and how many will actually succeed. I think it’s remarkable that we have this… around now, but it does worry me a bit.
Yes, a lot of people stream day after day with very few people watching. The top streams end up capturing more views.
There’s an independent American vtuber alliance forming, I don’t remember their name (I think Pokimane?) … and some other American agency.
Hololive is actually smaller than their competitor in Japan, but they made a gamble in the USA with 5 talents this last September and they are doing very well. English speaking market covers Europeans, South Americans, Southeast Asians, the entire global market.
I would guess very few at that level. As Armando pointed out you can get started for much cheaper, unless you want to start doing mocap at the level she did. But she was an animator/programmer who already had experience with the technologies and knew what she was getting into, technologically speaking.
Now once you get down to $5k and less, probably a lot more.
Yes, but I was suggesting that even for that x% that makes it, Twitch looks bad. Like Armando explained, unlike most other fields, a Twitch user could have their entire revenue stream disappear overnight for reasons that seem baffling or arbitrary to them. The article says that Miko is one ban away from a permanent Twitch ban (which looks to be 100% of her project’s income), for instance. There’s no guaranteed contract, severance pay, or coaching/teaching position for her to fall back on.
I have actually been watching Pekora since September, she is a funny rabbit comedian. I tried to find an interesting clip but they need context. It’s kind of like wrestling, if you’ve watched Glow. Storylines help you appreciate the show more
Yeah, I agree that Twitch’s recent moves, especially the one where they gave streamers only a few hours to delete all their VODs with copyrighted music in them and then deleted everything, are probably worrying for Twitch streamers. In a perfect world there’d be competition that would force Twitch to be more transparent.
Yep. That said, if you’re making big money off Twitch, what you can and should do is save/invest most of it, and then when your income suddenly vanishes you’re at the very least in a position to find something else and possibly sufficiently independently wealthy to start your own business or live off investments. I assume a lot of people aren’t, of course.
