I'm gonna go on a bit of a tangent here just to let out my thoughts on streaming lately and how I've been feeling. Perhaps some of you may relate to some of what I say, or maybe not but I still just wanna get it out there.
As some may or may not have noticed, I haven't been multi streaming as much and you could even say I haven't been giving it my all to streaming in general lately, or even for quite some time now. I think as a whole I've been burning out and I've been trying to wrap my head around why I feel that way. I think when I started streaming, amongst the many feelings I had that drove me to stream, a key one was a desire to also give me a reason of sorts to either revisit nostalgic games I miss, play old games I never had a chance to play, or to work through my game backlog in general. I think I was able to give it my all because viewership aside, I really enjoyed what I was playing and it was fun whenever someone would stop by and talk about the game I was playing and we share experiences and such. With that said, viewership would largely come and go as not sticking to one core game or games meant that there was no real foundation to keep people around.
To deal with this I tried making a game or two as a sort of main game that I always play, take Valorant or League of Legends for instance, both games I enjoy and have no issues playing for extended periods of time. There were others I experimented with as well for a while but ultimately I noticed the same trend each time. There would be growth for a bit and a slight growth to CCV but then it would drop back down again as though viewers lost interest in watching the game. So, if sticking to one game didn't work and switching around games didn't work then what else is there to do? Collabs, while fun also don't help in any way as it's clear my small community has no interest in collab type streams and much prefer solo streams.
So, ultimately my mind tells me I should just play what I want to play. The same way I started streaming in the first place and those that show up, show up, and those that don't, don't. Now the issue I found for myself with that now is that I often time, most notably with story focused games (which I enjoy probably most of all), I love getting immersed in the stories and worlds but since I'm streaming it tends to mean I can never quite fully immerse myself since I try to focus on also being entertaining and yapping non-stop almost. It becomes draining after a point and I think what's burning me out of two things essentially.
First, I'm streaming things I really don't wholeheartedly want to.
Second, I'm trying to force my personality and self to keep up the appearance of an entertainer of sorts rather that just the calm, relatively low energy person I tend to be (who does, on some occasion crack a joke or two). I'm an introvert by nature and I think I've been trying to force myself to be extroverted to make stream more entertaining to viewers and to hopefully pull in newer views as well.
I think what I want to do, is just stream what I have a desire to stream in the moment, not caring what anyone thinks and just approach it with my natural energy and vibe. Not pushing myself to be anything I'm not because it may help my growth or produce more clip-worthy moments. I work a full time job outside of streaming and gaming has always been my way of relaxing after a long day. I never want streaming and the games I play to feel like something I have to do, that feels draining or like work. I approached it like a hobby, like an extension of things I was already doing to relax in my day-to-day and I need to go back to treating it like that and not like it become a chore. I think by doing this I'll be able to find my spark again that helps to inspire me to want to give it my all, to multistream and make edited content for myself, to make thumbnails, and heck, to even post on here as well. So I'll start there for now. Thanks for reading if you did 💜🪽