STACK #148 Feb 2017

GAMES Q&A

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Q & A

We had a quick chat with Australia’s own multilingual streamer Bradley Jolly, aka DYoshiiTV, about what it takes to become a video game streamer Down Under. Words Alesha Kolbe stream time

international audience, how do you keep pepped up? I sleep in blocks. I also work a nine to five, and so I’ll get home and sleep for two to three hours. I’ll then wake up and stream from maybe 10pm until two am, then I’ll go back to sleep and wake up and go to work. I don’t sleep very much. Do you think the Australian scene is making much of an impact compared to the rest of the world? We’re still our own tiny little thing. In the grand scheme of things, there isn’t a huge

How did you get into streaming in the first place? I’d been watching other people streaming for a long time before I got into it. There were some cool competitive games doing the rounds when I started out – competitive Catherine was one of the first ones I watched. I just saw everyone having heaps of fun. When I left the television stuff I was doing, I still wanted to do something similar, so I ended up taking up streaming. A part of it was also my girlfriend trying to get me to use the capture card I’d bought a year prior. How difficult is it to get noticed in the medium? There are so many streamers

What kind of advice would you give to people who might want to get into the business? I always say just do it – just start. Download a streaming program, pick a game you like, and just start, just do one. It doesn’t matter if there’s no mic or no webcam. At least then you can say you’ve done one – congrats, you’re a streamer now. You need to ask why you want to do it – it’s very good to come into it knowing why you’re there in the first place. Knowing why is important

B r a d l e y J o l l y

Monster Hunter

streaming audience here, but it has grown so much since last year. At PAX 2015 there were only 10-20 streaming partners in attendance, and at least 150 showed up in 2016. It’s growing at an alarming rate, and I hope it grows a lot more. In Australia, we’re getting a lot more attention. Aussies and New Zealanders are getting flown to more places, getting more content and more sponsored content easily. Publishers and other firms are waking up to content creators being a good way to show the stuff they’re doing. We’re getting a lot more freedom, allowing us to grow more quickly in comparison to other regions. It’s 100 per cent an advertising thing. For example, the other month a bunch of content creators got ringside tickets to the wrestling, because they knew we could post pictures and whatnot. It was good fun.

I never streamed with the intention of becoming big – I just wanted to make some friends

to figure out from the get go. Doesn’t matter if it’s for money, or just because you’re keen to try something different, or because you want to make friends, or even simply share your games with an audience. You need a purpose.

on Twitch these days – and that isn’t a bad thing. There is a lot of luck involved, but a lot of it just comes down to why it is you want to stream in the first place. I never streamed with the intention of becoming big, I just wanted to make some friends. Anyone can do it. It’s just how you go about it; the people you meet and the people you network with along the way can go a long way into getting you noticed. Even the conventions you might go to. Everything you do helps to grow your audience, and to solidify it. Do you think it’s more important to stream popular games or to have a friendly and welcoming personality that people are likely to come back to? For me personally, I stream a wider variety of stuff than perhaps other streamers might. A lot of it is more Japanese-centric, so I know that the core audience is going to be smaller because that kind of stuff might not be appealing to everyone. Because I stream so much different content, people could be watching for either the games or the personality – it’s a good mixture of both.

For someone like you who needs to be up at ungodly hours of the morning for an

Catherine

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FEBRUARY 2017

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