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Penny Arcade - Comic - Alterior Motives
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Alterior Motives
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
+4
Posts
So... Twitch, then?
1. Yes they can, we're not so different after all
2. It's the reflection from the light saber.
3. hippos have a special gland that produces reddish sunscreen. Europeans who first observed this called it 'blood sweat'.
I think we're going to start see this across the internet. If you want to make money, you have to have something people are actually willing to pay money for. Not an audience that advertisers are willing to pay money to get in front of. But actual customers. Customers who hand you over money. Willingly and happily. Because what you do has value for them.
So, Patreon?
Yeah, all those free forums out there shouldn't even exist just because they use ads. Three cheers...
So getting that big caveat out of the way...
I'm also completely unwilling to financially support streamers. So all of the built-in sources of revenue on Twitch, such as buying and gifting subs, buying stickers and emotes and shit, starting hype trains, and all the other shenanigans that goes over there, I'm never going to pay a dime for any of that. Why? Because I don't think streaming is a "real job." Just me expressing my own opinion.
Sitting around for 12-16 hours a day and getting paid to play video games does nothing for society. Nothing is being built. Nothing of value is being contributed. No meaningful service is being provided. If it was up to me, streaming would be 100% entirely an unpaid hobby, and people should have to get real jobs and contribute meaningfully to society. /end of rant
So when I see these headlines about Twitch making shittier revenue splits, and big streamers jumping ship to go to other platforms, my response is always exactly the same: "I don't care, get a real job ya bums."
They're entertainers. Does someone who makes jokes in a standup show deserve to get paid? Then so do professional streamers. End of story. It's really not more complicated than that.
As for "contribution to society"? Honestly speaking, I'm pretty sure, say, Inugami Korone, who is a streamer that plays a dog girl playing videogames on the internet, has made a far greater contribution to society in three years than I will ever make adding up my entire life. All I do as a software developer is make my company a teensy bit slightly richer. She makes tens of thousands of people have a better day, puts out actual singles and music videos, and a bunch of etceteras.
(And I absolutely could not survive her job, to be perfectly honest)
Yes, we can tell that you don't watch Streamers. Because you don't understand the business at all.
First and foremost, streams are not just video games. Plenty of streamers do crafting, or makeup, or cooking, or streaming live events, or live music, or (licensed) radio, or tabletop gaming, or vlogging, or podcasting, etc, etc. Video games are just one section of the vast landscape that streaming has become.
Secondly, even the video game streamers usually have a niche. Maybe they're speedrunners, or they're reacting to cheesy horror games, or they play vintage games that people haven't heard of, or they play mods or WADs or other fan created content etc. The biggest draw though is the interacting with the community. A lot of these guys act as improv comedians, riffing on the game and on their community to entertain. Because at their core, they're entertainers. The value that streaming services like Twitch add is the infrastructure, discoverability, and global community. There may not be enough people in the indie metal scene in my town to justify an entire radio frequency dedicated to it, but globally there are enough to support dozens of streamers running their own "radio stations", funded off donations and subs, who basically DJ and keep people up to date with the bands. It's very hard to fill a stadium of people to watch the C-Team play, and very hard to keep all of them up to date on how the game is going, but it's (comparatively) easy to record or stream the game live.
Streaming is totally a career, in the same way that every form of entertainer is a career. If you can pay your expenses with it and it's legal, it's a viable career.
And is making some megacorp richer more "meaningful" than entertaining a dozen people? Because most streamers are small streamers. Many may only be performing for an audience of two or three active viewers. And some are lucky to even get that consistently. And I think it's probably true that most of the super-successful ones probably never even seriously expected it to work as an actual job. They were just doing their thing and people liked it.
That's not an opinion, that's an objectively incorrect factual statement. If it's legal, earns a revenue, and you pay your taxes, it's a real job.
Of course I understand that you put it in quotes to indicate you feel it has no value to society. But again, this is factually incorrect, as many people derive entertainment and a feeling of community from it. Multiple streamers have been told multiple times that they helped someone through their depression, low points in life, prevented their suicide, etc.
If you focus on "building something", we can think of real jobs as the ones that build houses, make food, plumbing, cure diseases, etc. Fair enough, those jobs are essential, they're how we live.
But how we live isn't all. There's also WHY we live.
If everyone built houses and made food so that everyone would be housed and fed, we'd live in houses, eat food, make babies... Why? What's the point?
Obviously, people seek something out of life. Meaning, pleasure, entertainment, etc. That's why we have music, fancy foods, fetishes, movies, books, painting, decorations in our house, etc.
Streamers make a contribution to society in the same sense as other forms of entertainment (and sometimes art) do.
You just don't care for this specific form of entertainment. Which is fair. I don't understand why alcohol is a thing, let alone a social thing. It's literally people ingesting poison and intoxicating their brain. I claim that there is zero reason to ever do that at any point in your life for any reason. But clearly not everyone agrees with me on that subject.
This is a troll account used to fluff the forums with discourse, right? Nobodies going to poop on internet entertainment that hard in a web comic forum, right? I mean i was sarcastically agreeing with someone earlier in order to prove a point at how harsh they were, but this guys going full something something...
Eh, more like merchandising. I think a lot of the more famous streamers on YouTube and Twitch have all said at one time or another that their wealth mostly comes from merchandising.
Which is what makes profitable streaming tricky, because you're almost assuredly selling your shit to kids.