Occasionally I get asked for advice about streaming on Twitch and, even though I’m still quite small, I’ve been giving it some thought. This month, I’ve decided to write down those thoughts, and put them here! Of course, these aren’t one-size fits all, just things that seem to work for me and others around me. This list is geared towards people just starting, and those who haven’t begun yet. Most of this advice will apply equally to streaming on YouTube or Altair, too!
This article is intended to compliment the wealth of other articles out there, not to replace them. Make sure you’re reading widely.
And so, preamble aside, let’s go!
1) All the advice in the world won’t help if you don’t start
If you want to stream, just start. The last two iterations of both the PlayStation and Xbox have built-in streaming capabilities, and getting started with PC-based streaming software is easy. If you want to play Jackbox with your friends, or show them your spaghetti roads in Cities: Skylines, or maybe you want people to help guide your kingdom in Crusader Kings, then you just need to get the footage to them. It doesn’t have to be polished, it just has to exist.
2) Perfect is the enemy of Good
Don’t stress over making your stream look perfect. Yes, I know, all your friends have shiny custom splash screens and title cards, and they have all this great music, and their emotes are lovely, and their alerts are unique. They’ve been at it for a while, and slowly accumulated this stuff. You’ll slowly pick up all this stuff too! When you’re starting, you don’t even need any art, and you can always add it in later!
Placeholder art is good, actually. It’s perfectly fine to use free assets from streaming resource sites like Streamlabs and Stream Elements, or the built-in assets in StreamlabsOBS and OBS.Live. Twitch provides a slew of free emotes for you to use, though you won’t need (read: be able to use) emotes for a while. When you reach a point where you feel you need art, it’s more important that you have some art than it is to have perfect, or even original art. Use placeholder art. Hell, at the time of writing this, I’m still using placeholder art from two years ago!
3) Your microphone sounds fine
The only job of your microphone to let your viewers hear you. A headset microphone that you’d use for work is perfect. The one built into your laptop can work (if you’re not using said laptop’s keyboard), or the ones in most USB webcams. Depending on your voice,* phone earbuds might even work! You just need to be audible and be understood by your audience.
This isn’t to say that better microphones aren’t, well, better. If you take to streaming, like a fish to water, then upgrading your microphone might be a huge benefit to you as time goes on, but you don’t need one when you start. If you have a microphone you use on Discord or when you game with your friends, you’ve got a microphone you can use on stream.
*Microphones are weird. Small microphones, like the ones in phones and earbuds, are tuned to respond to the average range of the human voice, but are much better at picking up higher frequency sounds. This is why people with deep voices often sound “hollow” on the phone, as the microphone de-emphasises the deep, fundamental part of the voice, and over-emphasises the higher content. If you have a higher voice, like many cis women, you’ll likely be fine with cheaper and smaller microphones, including earbud microphones.**
**This footnote ended up way longer than I wanted it to, but that’s what happens when I get talking about microphones. If you wanna know more, please ask, as per the next tip!
4) Get by with a little help from your friends
Chances are, if you’re wanting to start streaming, you’ve got some friends that stream already. Let them know your plans! They might be able to offer advice, and they might have a place in their community spaces for you to self-promote. Use your existing networks! Don’t badger people, obviously, but do post on social media and tell people that you’re doing cool stuff. If your driving reason to stream is to show off your gameplay to your friends, make sure they know you’re streaming.
Your streamer friends are a fantastic resource of what to do and what not to do, of utilities, and of exposure. If your streamer friends allow it, advertising in designated areas of their communities can be incredibly helpful for your early growth. Twitch requires you to have 50 followers and an average of 3 viewers before you’re able to monetise your stream. Those numbers seem small, but they can take time to reach. Being able to borrow from existing, strong communities can be a huge boon in the early days, and can even help when you start to cement your own community too.
Your friends might be able to help in other ways, too! Maybe you know an artist who can help with your splash screens or emotes, or a programmer who can help wrangle (or even make!) chatbots for you. Maybe you know a composer or music producer who can throw together some sounds or music for you. Just don’t forget to pay your friends back, preferably with money. Depending where they are with their careers, and what they’re doing with their skills, your friends might insist their work and time is free, in which case you should definitely find some other way to repay them. Skill swaps are also incredibly useful, especially if you’ve got a talent your creative friends need, but not even artists can eat art!
5) Take a look, it’s in a book
Don’t know how to do something? Look it up! Thousands of people have done this before you, which means there’s a metric crapload of information out there. A lot of it won’t apply to you, sure, but a lot will! Don’t know how to configure OBS? Google it! Don’t know what bitrate to use? Twitch has you covered, but if you use NVENC then I prefer this calculator, which takes into account that NVidia 20-Series and 1660 cards can do similar video quality with a lower bitrate.
An early issue I had to look up was how to pipe PlayStation voice party audio onto stream. I was using the built in streaming system, I’d set it to include party audio, and yet nothing was coming through on stream. It turns out that each party member has to allow their audio to be shared, which isn’t obvious.
6) Know your software
Whether you use your console’s built-in system, or OBS Studio, OBS.Live, SlOBS, XSplit or something else entirely, you need to spend time learning what works for you. Everything is configurable. Getting your stream tools to work for you, and not be distracting, takes experimentation, iteration, play, and time. While watching and reading tutorial material is useful (see the last tip!), and exposes you to new possibilities, the only way to know if it’ll work for you is to actually do it.
When setting up OBS Studio, you have the option to either sign in to Twitch or manually connect with your Twitch stream key. If you choose to sign in, then OBS Studio will automatically add panels for your chat, activity feed and stream statistics. These panels function just like your source selection panel or your mixer panel, but they’re actually small webpages embedded into OBS’ interface, and OBS Studio has a “Custom Browser Docks…” button. Knowing all this, you now have the power to add anything you want into your OBS interface! Going even deeper, OBS lets you move everything around and put it wherever you want. It even lets you put panels on top of each other in tabbed layers, or pop them out into their own window. I’ve set mine up to give me access to everything I need while streaming, with everything I need beforehand in tabs so that they’re out of the way when I go live.
What’s your regular pre-/start of stream ritual? Do you tweet that you’re going live? You can set up a panel with a pre-filled tweet using this guide (which you can also use to get your viewers to tweet about your stream). That way, you can fill in the appropriate info and send your tweet from right inside OBS!
Do you need access to your rewards queue? Do you want to integrate a third party alert feed, like Stream Elements so you can see tips? You can!
This tip goes double for anything you use in tandem with your streaming software. Say you’re using OBS Studio, and you want to use a streaming overlay from Stream Elements. You can integrate that as a browser source in OBS, but you’ll need to edit the actual overlay on the Stream Elements website. That overlay editor has near infinite customisability, including the option to code entirely new elements from scratch.
If that sounds daunting, don’t panic! They have a Discord server where people share elements they’ve made, and you can shove them into your overlay and customise them as needed. Spending time just poking around the editor and the Discord server will give you an idea of the possibilities available, including where you can use your own artwork to customise things fully!
7) Do what you wanna do, play what you wanna play
It’s obvious, but it’s worth stating: Twitch is heavily algorithmic. If your goal is to play the algorithm and stream popular games, then you need to have enough viewers to place high on the charts. That’s not to say you shouldn’t stream Final Fantasy XIV, or Apex, or GTA V, or Dark Souls 3, but rather to temper your expectations with regards to how many viewers you’ll pull by doing so.
Sure! If you stream the same game at the same time consistently, you’ll grow an audience for it over time, but those streamers often struggle to keep that audience if they ever change games. It can help to swap to similar games, like from Mario Maker 2 to a Super Mario World ROM hack, and speedrunners and randomizer fiends will often keep much of their audience when they change which game they’re running. Chasing the Twitch meta by streaming only the most popular games can work, but there’s another option.
Variety streamers grow more slowly but viewer retention is easier across multiple games. Viewers are there for the streamer – their personality, views, their style and tastes. It’s the difference between liking Van Gogh and liking paintings of sunflowers. Viewers of single-game streamers might like the way Vincent’s strokes emulate the subtle movements of the petals, but they’d just as soon go buy Piet Mondrian’s Sunflowers. Variety viewers are there because they like Vincent. Maybe they came for the Sunflowers, but knew he’d soon paint a church, and they’re excited to see how those same stroke patterns might communicate the swirling air high in the night sky.
If you’re reading this, chances are you joined one of my streams because of the game, but you keep coming back for the chaos and vibes.
8) Tortoise, not Hare
Streaming is slow. Every step of your streaming journey takes time, and it’s well worth giving it all the time it needs. Building a starting community can take time. Reaching the affiliate requirements for any given platform takes time. Finding your exact niche and vibe takes time. Building a community takes time. Let things take their time.
9) Community Manager? I ‘ardly know ‘er!
Building a community is often part of your role as a streamer, though it doesn’t have to be. If you are solely doing a broadcast show on Twitch, you may not need to actively curate a community. For everyone else, an active community provides a resource for feedback and an avenue for releasing updates. Whether you cultivate a community on Twitter, Discord, Guilded or Reddit, it’s important to keep up with it as much as you can. Don’t run yourself into the ground, obviously, but do try to stay up-to-date with the day-to-day activities.
Even more importantly, curate your community. Make sure people follow your rules, and vibe with you. Make sure your community is welcoming of exactly the kind of people you want in your stream chat, and not to people you don’t want in your chat. Your community becomes a reflection of you, and is often a person’s first real impression of who you are as a creator. Setting rules and boundaries is something I struggle with, and there’s times when people do things that aren’t breaking any rules, but are still disruptive. A good moderation team is a must, and they’ll help you figure out if these things need addressing, and help you to address them too. Trust your gut, be liberal with timeouts and bans as needed. Make sure you, and your community, are having fun.
10) Automatic, systematic, hydromatic…
Automation is a powerful, powerful tool. Many parts of your streaming setup can benefit from automation, but not everything should be automated. Tools exist to add chatbots to your stream, automated chatters for your chat that can send pre-written messages on a timer or as responses to commands. Some of these bots, like Nightbot, are hosted online and don’t require any downloaded software. This means that the bots can be accessed even when your computer is turned off. Nightbot is also able to join your Discord server and respond to commands there, making it useful for dispensing links or for games and quote lists. Other bots, like Streamlabs Chatbot require a download and run from your machine, but are generally more flexible and more powerful, able to trigger sounds or directly alter parts of your stream output. Bots can also automatically moderate your chat, timing out or banning people for using certain words or phrases, or even for sharing links without permission.
Once you’ve automated chat, you might think that’s all there is to do, but not so! Now you can automate your stream! From fancy transitions, to custom overlays, there are many ways to control your stream with minimal effort. Custom overlays can be used to do almost anything, for example showing the name and profile picture of a streamer you want to promote, or special video filters that can be toggled on and off. Scene changes and sources/filters in OBS can be set to hotkeys, meaning you don’t have to even leave your game window to drive stream.
But what if you wanted to go even further? Hardware like the Elgato Stream Deck or software like Touch Portal will let you set up buttons to do everything from start/stop stream, play sounds and music, swap scenes and toggle filters, or send messages in chat. While I’ve not used a Stream Deck, I’ve been using Touch Portal for a while now and found it to be a powerful tool. It’s able to listen for chat messages and play sounds in response, to wait for channel point redemptions and automatically toggle filters or sources, and even to mute and unmute audio sources in tandem with scene changes.
Should you automate everything, though? Well, no, probably not. I’ve found that it’s easy to do too much, just because you can. While it’s helpful to be able to rapid fire links to social media or Patreon at the end of a stream, I’ve found it unhelpful to automatically post all of the links one after the other upon switching to the ending screen. By the time I get to talking about the second link, people have sent enough messages to push it off the top of the screen. Instead, having ready access to buttons that will send the links when you’re ready is much more helpful.
11) Have fun
Streaming is fun! If you’re enjoying yourself, and having a good time, that will show and people will respond in kind. If you’re hating every moment of a game, and you’re not enjoying streaming, your viewers will pick up on that and respond, and might not stick around. If you need to take a break, do. Don’t make yourself hate this. Streaming is a performance, and it’s tiring. You need to be able to give it the energy it deserves.
Go live
Streaming is a big undertaking, and there’s so much more I want to be able to impart. Maybe I’ll revisit this another time, with some more focussed and advanced advice for growing and established streamers, but this should help you get going. If you want more specific advice, feel free to ask me or your other streamer pals (as per tip 4)!
For now, all that’s left is for you to hit that Go Live button.