Meanwhile one former ABC TV presenter has made the switch to going direct to his audience and working for himself full time on Twitch.
Steven “Bajo” O’Donnell is the former host of ABC’s Good Game video games TV show. He left the show in 2017 and focused his attention on becoming a full-time Twitch streamer, and now makes his primary income through the site.
“I’ve been so lucky to have the Good Game community to help me get a leg up on Twitch,” he says.
“I think as a streamer you’re out there first and foremost to be an entertainer. To be successful at that, the audience needs to see you care, and that you’re willing to commit and put in the work. To make it in life, at one point or another, you need to break your back doing something and go all in.”
Fans of a Twitch streamer can always watch for free, but they can also choose to subscribe to a streamer’s channel to directly support their efforts. They can also make one-off donations.
For a generation often accused of stealing movies, music and TV shows and refusing to pay for content, Twitch has become a space where the direct relationship between creator and fan has encouraged them to open their wallets.
“Thanks to my generous supporters and sponsors, I earn a good living now,” O’Donnell says. “I’m having much more fun working for myself. What you put into it, you get out of it.”
While O’Donnell is a more recent convert, other Australians have been making a living for much longer as streamers on Twitch, building close-knit communities of fans in the process.
Ryan “Chinglish” Dingle has been streaming for over six years, with thousands of monthly subscribers supporting his work.
Whereas O’Donnell plays many different games on his stream, Dingle focuses entirely on a single game, World of Warcraft.
If you’re looking at your actual sustainable income you’re going from $20,000 one month to $7000 the next … It can fluctuate that much.
— Twitch streamer Ryan “Chinglish” Dingle
“If I’m doing something 60 to 70 hours a week, I have to love it,” says Dingle. “I wake up and I want to play WoW so I play WoW. It’s been that way for six years.”
As a single game streamer, Dingle sees peaks and troughs as interest in the game and its events shift (World of Warcraft is in its fifteenth year).
In 2018 a new expansion was released for World of Warcraft, which brought renewed interest. But that focus also means Dingle’s audience expects him to only ever play Warcraft.
“Last year I did some [real-life] streams from Korea and Japan and they were some of my favourite streams I’ve ever done,” says Dingle.
“But I lost 400 subscribers in two weeks and people said they only watch me for WoW streams. As fickle as that is, it’s just the nature of streaming.”
While it may sound like a gamer’s dream to get paid for playing, the fickle nature of the online audience, and the large number of streamers competing for their attention, means those looking to build a full-time streaming career face constant pressure to be always online playing live.
“There’s been burnout. Weeks I’ve panicked. Weeks I’ve doubted everything,” says O’Donnell. “Streaming is definitely the most exhausting, challenging job I’ve ever had, but I’ve also never enjoyed anything so much.”
“Streaming is definitely the most exhausting, challenging job I’ve ever had, but I’ve also never enjoyed anything so much,” O’Donnell says. Ben Searcy
“The more generous everyone is, the harder I want to work. I tend to go really hard, then collapse for a few days, then go really hard,” says O’Donnell. “Most streams end with [viewers] rioting, forcing me to go to bed because they can see I’m falling apart.”
For Dingle, he’s seen months where his subscriber numbers shift dramatically from almost 6000 one month to 2000 the next.
“So if you’re looking at your actual sustainable income you’re going from $20,000 one month to $7000 the next,” Dingle says. “It can fluctuate that much.”
“There’s a lot of full-time streamers who can stream 60 to 70 hours a week and can have less subscribers at the end of the week. It’s about trying to hopefully have more positive weeks than negative.”
Dingle has previously worked in jobs as varied as traditional business to construction, and says he sees life as a Twitch streamer as the hardest work he’s ever done.
O’Donnell as viewers of ABC’s Good Game show remember him, alongside his former co-host Stephanie “Hex” Bendixsen.
“Mentally, trying to entertain people for 60 to 70 hours a week is tough. Some weeks we try and it just fails miserably no matter how hard you try,” he says.
“Imagine literally having a thousand people critiquing everything you do, and if you take a day off you lose a big part of your revenue.”
But both Dingle and O’Donnell say they value the sense of community they have built with their audience, and have had experiences varying from helping troubled community members through hard times, to raising money for charity on special stream events.
“I don’t think there’s a TV gig out there that could pull me away from streaming full-time,” O’Donnell says. “Being able to interact directly with a community that has already gotten to know me over the years is pure, uncut joy.”
