Reflecting on Streaming, My Experience so Far

Welcome, weebs, to Animated Observations

Hey friends, couple of housekeeping things before I get into the meet of this post. First, #TheJCS is still going on this month, so if you have not submitted please do so! If you are not familiar with #TheJCS, you can read my announcement post for this month which will explain everything in detail. Second, apologies for the late posts this week, getting back on a schedule has been harder on me mentally than I initially thought. With that being said, I wanted to take a bit of a break and talk about something I have been enjoying a lot recently, which is streaming.

I think its fair to say that a significant portion of the people who spent any significant time as a kid playing video games probably dreamed about playing them for a living. As it turns out, that has now become a reality for many people on the internet. Streaming has not only become popular, but the arrival of the pandemic last year made it a much more immediately available form of entertainment, since many then had the time to watch streams.

I myself had never really thought much about streaming before I got my PC. After all, I do not really like having eyes on me while I do things, and, at least initially, I was not super keen on letting other people watch me play games. At least, not in a live environment.

However, after trying it out for the last few months or so, I have come to a couple observations. First, as it turns out, I actually don’t mind people watching me that much. As of the writing of this post, my highest consecutive viewer count is six, and most of my recent streams have had about two to three people watching. Most of the time it just feels like hanging out with friends while we each do our own thing.

Second, While having better setups can definitely improve the quality of a stream, having a dedicated streaming setup is not actually necessary. When I initially asked my friend to help me build a PC, it was supposed to be a budget build. This was because, at the time, I had not interest in streaming and mainly just wanted a more efficient way to get work done. But, as it turns out, you can still have fairly good quality without crazy good specs on your computer.

Third, I have definitely come away from my streaming experiences with a new perspective on it. I used to be of the somewhat ignorant mindset that streaming is fairly easy from the perspective of being an entertainer. While I do think it can be easier in certain respects, communicating with an active chat while also doing other things is significantly more difficult than I initially thought.

Overall, I have had a great experience with streaming so far. While it may be more difficult than I initially thought, I definitely want to continue. If you want to join me on my Stream journey, feel free to drop a follow on my Twitch. As of right now I have been focusing on Smash Ultimate and Hearthstone, but I do plan on playing some anime related games in the near future. If you have any thoughts on what games I should play, feel free to drop a comment down below.

If you did read this far, thank you for indulging me. Regularly scheduled content should resume on Sunday.

If you are interested in reading more from me, check under blog to read my most recent stuff, or look below for some related posts. Also, if you would like to support Animated Observations, consider donating on Ko-fi or through paypal, or pledging on Patreon. You can even support by just liking and sharing this post.