WORDS.

Number 3 might actually shock you. Yes, I have done this joke before, why do you ask?

Right, this is a bit out of the blue. I was just going to do a Bluesky thread about it, but I’ve been too into that over the past few months so I’m taking a little break from being on there so much. Also, I pay £13 a year for this website, so I need to get my money’s worth.

Streaming isn’t something I’ve taken particularly seriously for well over two years now, and even then it was mostly out of necessity. My current approach is to just have a laugh, to rediscover the things that made me want to begin six years ago. “Growth” and “Metrics” mean nothing to me anymore, and for the time being, I’m directing viewers to donate to charity in lieu of subscriptions. That said, I’m willing to spring random, incredibly low-effort schemes on the off-chance something works and things re-take off. So, no more over-edited bubblegum TikToks about animals in video games that make me turn inside out whenever I think about them, but I’ll happily upload an old clip onto YouTube Shorts once a week just to see what happens. I kind of just treat them like lottery tickets: if I win big, wonderful, but I don’t buy tickets because I expect to win.

Streaming on TikTok is another small change I’ve made over the past few months. Okay, it took a short while to set up (and it’s not fully finished yet. More on that later), but that involved one of my favourite pastimes: mucking about in OBS. Multi-streaming, or simulcasting (or some other nonsense word) was something I’d wanted to try for a while, though I never understood how to stream in landscape and portrait at the same time (even if I knew, my old PC would have thrown itself out the window). Once I’d figured it out, I went in with no expectations. It was just a fun little experiment, where I could dip my toes in and see how warm the Gamer Juice was, more than anything. After probably about a dozen streams, I can say with certainty that it’s been interesting, and I feel like there’s quite a bit to discuss, so here we are.

Side note: I’ve also been streaming on YouTube at the same time, but literally nobody gives a shit about that.

█ 1. It’s Still a Short-Form Platform

Whether it’s that TikTok users really do have a shorter attention span or that they’re simply expecting attention-grabbing content because they’re on TikTok, I’ve noticed you have to reel them in immediately. That means they’ll swipe away if they see something that’s the norm on a platform like Twitch, such as “starting soon” or “be right back”. Even the little 5-minute introduction chat I usually do is seemingly frowned upon, with a few “just play the game” comments coming in at times. If you leave for five minutes to grab a quick snack during a long stream, everyone will have left within a minute, and if this happens, it can be really difficult to claw those viewers back, given you’re fighting against the dreaded algorithms. I’ve found the best thing to do is just end the stream and go live again once you’ve returned.

But… wouldn’t that mean I’d have to end the Twitch stream at the same time? Not quite, my friend, because…

█ 2. You Can’t Use OBS for TikTok

Let’s be abundantly clear: this is very fucking stupid. There are rumours that, in the days of yore, you would set up your stream on TikTok in the same way you would set up a stream on any other platform: with a stream key you input into OBS. That is no longer an option. TikTok does not supply you with a stream key unless you’re a bigger streamer or you join an “agency”, which, from my experiences of several sending me DMs, are a bunch of incredibly shady organisations run by grifters that want to “help you grow” out of the goodness of their own hearts. And by that, I mean they take a cut of any earnings you make, and you have an obligation to stream for a certain amount of hours per day/week/month.

That means, unless you’re either very lucky or a total fool, the only way to stream on TikTok from your PC is if you use TikTok LIVE Studio, an entirely pointless bit of kit. The good news is you can just route your OBS Virtual Camera into it, set up the audio, and you’re good to go. They also had an interesting “dual layout” feature in which you could have both a portrait and landscape layout, and TikTok users could rotate their phones to switch between them. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, this no longer exists, as users were allegedly showing fake games on the portrait layout and showing movies on the landscape layout.

Anyway, let’s move on to something more positive…

█ 3. The People Are… Quite Lovely, Actually

My biggest fear with TikTok was it would attract all the unpleasant folk I spoke about in an old post. It’s a platform where moderation is apparently applied with complete randomness: A comment I reported that threatened to kill several groups of people was apparently not a TOS violation, yet they took down a video of nothing but a cat that I posted. Anyway, I’m not sure that lot have figured out how to view streams yet as pretty much everyone I’ve interacted so far with has been just fine. Sure, you get the “just play the game” rubbish I mentioned earlier, and the occasional users with daft names, but compared to what I’ve had to deal with on Twitch in the past (which I’m aware is a vastly superior sample size), I’ve not had any issues. I think the only issue I’ve had is with backseaters, and they give up pretty fast if you just tell them to stop or ignore them.

Unfortunately, while you can add a description to the stream where you can list chat rules, nobody reads it. Probably because…

█ 4. The UI Is Abominable

TikTok LIVE Studio allows me to set both the title of the stream and the game I’m playing, which I assume both show up somewhere for viewers. Where? Who fucking knows, there’s a billion other things that appear over the stream that are clearly far more important than the stream title or the stream itself. Seriously, I don’t have a clue what any of the little pop-ups are, but I’m going to assume they’re all related to microtransactions or whatever TikTok’s equivalent to Twitch’s “Bits” is called. What the hell is the “TT LIVE GALA”? Why is this so important that I cannot remove the pop-up from my screen? In fact, why can’t I remove ANY of these pop-ups? I don’t understand; how does anyone put up with this guff?

I’m also fairly sure the terrible UI is the reason the next point is such an issue.

█ 5. So Many Questions

I’ve streamed for long enough to know you’ll always have people asking questions, most of which I’m happy to answer. Twitch seemed to have a lot of chatters that came in to ask me for tech support, for whatever reason. Maybe they were thinking “Your game is working, so why isn’t mine?”. Just the other day, I received a comment on an old VOD, asking “Why is my game green?”... whatever that means.

On TikTok, you don’t get that so much. It probably helps that there’s a fairly strict character limit. What you do get a lot of, however, is “What game is this?”. Bear in mind TikTok LIVE Studio lets me set the specific game I’m playing, but apparently, that’s either completely hidden or behind a hundred tiny pop-ups, so... whatever. I put the game name in the stream title. That didn’t help because nobody looks at the title. Fine, I typed in the game name on the stream itself, directly underneath the game capture.

During the next stream:

“What game is this?”

“Is this on [console]?”

So, I’ve listed all the platforms you can buy the game on underneath the game title. Yet, that will not deter everyone. In one Pokémon stream, I got a couple of questions about the Charizard (nicknamed “Miss Casey”) in my party. Questions along the lines of “what’s that orange Pokémon?”. To be fair, it was a very detailed piece of art, so it was hard to tell what Pokémon it was supposed to be (no, changing the art wasn’t an option, and I can’t be bothered to explain why). Underneath the art, I wrote:

“The orange Pokémon (Miss Casey) is a Charizard.”

Despite this, during the next stream, I was asked “What’s that orange Pokémon?” EIGHTEEN times (thanks YouTube transcripts for making that incredibly easy to find out). I triple-checked and there was no pop-up covering that text. It was easily legible. I haven’t got a clue how so many people missed it.

Obviously, I have no real issue with answering questions. I like chatting with people, and some are inevitably going to ask about what you’re playing, but you can imagine it does get a bit grating answering the same question every ten minutes. I’ve never had it that bad on Twitch before, even with twice as many viewers. Perhaps it’s because…

█ 6. Everyone’s So Young

Young people ask more questions. I have no scientific research to base that off, but we all know it, don’t we?

Yes, I know I’m “only” 28, but I was playing Pokémon X, which came out in 2013, and I was 17 at that point. A fair amount of chatters were claiming they grew up with that game, which, assuming they first played it between the ages of 6-10, puts them between the ages of 18 and 22 now (for context, I’d only just begun streaming at 22). The analytics back this up: 43% of my TikTok viewers have been between the ages of 18 and 24, which, especially compared to Twitch, where almost all the regulars are older than me, is really quite young. It’s not all that surprising; TikTok is geared towards a younger audience. If anything, I’m more shocked at how old everyone made me feel. Like I said earlier though, the general youthfulness didn’t translate into immaturity at all, save for one or two (I’m looking at you, Cum Cheese), so it’s not a problem.

Here’s another thing that’s not a problem. Segue!

█ 7. Who Here Likes Followers?