State of creation 3/2023

Okay, it’s a little bit too grandiose title, but yeah, that is what I’m going with 😅
…but we need to talk.

I’ve never been a huge creator, but I like to create and mostly my content gets positive feedback, so I guess I’m doing something right. Something that most people get wrong about me, is that I really and honestly do not care about the view counts on my content. …I joke about not having that many views, but at the same time, getting a huge number of views has never been the goal.

Gaming and everything relating to it for me is a hobby and as such it’s meant to be fun and enjoyable for me personally. My content creation is a byproduct of that enjoyment, it has never been the goal. Making money from my content is even further from my goals, but I also at the same time can be frustrated about needing a new computer and that mindset shows on streams and socials. That has also led to a situation where I feel like I’m not showing enough appreciation that I have for the people that do support me as a content creator, especially monetarily.

Gaming has been my main hobby my whole life, and from motivating me to learn English as a kid, to connecting me to new friends all around the world even today, among other things, I have a lot to thank gaming for.

I do like creating gaming-related content and all the technical stuff it requires. I can easily spend hours on a minute-long video that then gets less than 100 views and still be happy about it. My happy place is kinda the creation part, regardless of how it performs.

At the same time, keeping gaming and content creation as a hobby brings some limitations for me. I fully acknowledge that a lot of these barriers are created in my head, but not exclusively. I’m a geek, even a nerd, there’s no denying it. I love figuring out problems and technical issues however trivial the solution is. That said just like anyone, I get frustrated if I have to keep fixing the same thing over and over again without a long-term fix.

Sometimes that solution requires throwing money at it, and especially with today’s tech prices, that can get costly fast… too costly for just a hobby. While it’s all related, I’m not going to go into details here, that’s a story for another post.

Over the years I have learned a lot about games and I know a lot about many games, and I’ve heard at least something about most games that have had any kind of success in the western market. I put enough hours into this hobby that it’s nice to have at least something to show for it. I have never been the best player in the world on any game, nor have I even wanted to pursue competitive success and that’s where my content creation kinda steps in.

I have always been recording the games I play as long as it has been a thing and as I had a capable computer, but I’ve rarely posted anything. I’ve deleted some of my earliest Youtube videos, but my first gaming video is still from 2009. It’s in 480p because that was the max resolution on Youtube at that time, and to this day I regret deleting the higher quality source material. Here’s the video:

Over the years I’ve had countless ideas for videos and I’ve actually edited hundreds of videos… never to be released because I didn’t think they were good enough. I understand that my videos can’t ever be perfect. Especially since I haven’t been releasing them and growing as a creator that way… That doesn’t stop my brain from going “that’s not good enough” and not releasing the videos. The handful of videos that I did get out was the result of me momentarily overcoming my internal perfectionist.

At the same time, software kept evolving, and rather than having to record unpacked HUGE video files with Fraps, kinda having to know beforehand if something amazing was going to happen and then having to edit down hour-long videos for a 2 min clip. In the last years, I’ve been able to instead have Nvidia Instant Replay always running and save the last 20 minutes with a push of a button.

Like in many things I like to say that “I have my moments” and while I do have a lot more content on the cutting room floor, rather than published anywhere, I do sometimes get something out there.

With the Instant Replay and the rise of short-form video platforms, I started to release some videos mostly on Twitter first as it was my main social media, and then ventured into Youtube shorts and ended up releasing a few longer videos too.

While all this is happening, as a gamer I’m getting more and more into PUBG and Twitch. While I had been on Twitch since 2011 and sometimes thought that I could stream someday, I never had given it a serious thought.

The more videos I made and actually released, the more I started to think about streaming myself. Working on RaluMyst’s stream and overlay’s made me get more and more interested in the technical side of streaming and playing with streamers on their channels and getting asked if I stream and why not kinda made the choice for me.

From the start my motivations to stream have been weird, I think. I’ve always been more interested in the tech behind the stream and using the stream as a half excuse to have a reason to learn things… including spoken English because while I can write, I’m still a Finnish person who struggles with all the pronunciations. …the perfectionist attitude I mentioned before doesn’t help either. Still, the stream was going great at first. I got way more comfortable being in front of a camera and kept learning new stuff every stream.

However, after months of feeling good about it and just wanting to get better at it over time, I started to feel the annoyance of having to remember to turn Nvidia Instant Replay off before the stream and on again after the stream, because my computer couldn’t handle both at the same time. As I forgot, either the stream was horribly laggy, or I was missing out on being able to save off-stream plays.

Over the following months, PUBG started becoming more and more demanding and my aging computer started to show its age, especially on stream. It started to reach the point that I couldn’t create the content I wanted. I didn’t want to stream being annoyed at the performance the whole stream. During all this early 2022 also life things happened and I had to take time off streaming anyway and I kinda fell out of the habit of it.

I would like to say that I play a huge variety of games and I have. I have at least tested most categories of games and especially shooter, adventure, puzzle, and strategy games. However, since its launch back in 2017, and especially in the last two years I have been mainly playing PUBG (formerly known as Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds). At the moment, if I’m not playing PUBG or deeply focusing on something else, I usually have someone’s PUBG stream open at least on the second monitor.

I wanted to stream and I missed it. But coming back to worse and worse performance on PUBG just was mentally too taxing and PUBG was and still is the main game I want to stream. And in late August I made the hard choice to stop trying to stream for now. Honestly, that kinda broke me for a while. I went from playing just about daily off-stream to not playing for over 2 months.

I returned to PUBG in November, but following that PUBG’s performance has only gone down for me. I haven’t been able to activate Nvidia Instant Replay, nor Highlights anymore, because my computer can’t handle it. Even without anything recording, there have been days that games performance has been worse than ever. Only right now with the new PUBG servers, I’m starting to see some hope for this computer yet.

I’ve learned a lot from streaming over a year and about myself as a streamer. I want to continue that journey, but at the moment I can not see it happening with this computer.

Streaming still has to be a hobby for me.
Streaming still has to be about fun first.

I’ve been in the talks about fiber internet with a local ISP for a year now, and I should be finally getting it this summer. With today’s prices a new computer is going to be a big investment for a hobby, but I’ve made a decision to pool my money and make it happen by the time the new connection is installed. Honestly, might be back to streaming the night I get the PC setup, 100% within a week of it.

The plan is to main PUBG still, but I also have a list of other games I want to play and stream when I have a more capable computer. Getting excited about what the second half of 2023 brings!! …unless it’s Russian troops -.-

While I’m not streaming myself

For all that content that I have barely gotten out, I have spent hours and hours more just testing and tinkering with the tools, maybe even more than actually working on things I have ended up releasing. I have no regrets about it, I love learning stuff like this. And now, I have found another way to make all that knowledge useful, regardless if I create content myself.

This wasn’t instantly obvious to me before, but now it makes a lot of sense. I’ve been watching Twitch for over 10 years, but I had never really thought about moderating for anyone. Turns out that being able to help streamers as a moderator and “ask me anything” kinda person is really enjoyable for me, not to mention making new good friends from it!

While I like it, just like gaming, moderating is a hobby. I do it when I have time and I don’t go around asking to be everyone’s mod. I have always been a community member first and then at some point taking on the mod responsibilities has made sense.

Since I’ve been a PUBG main for years now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that PUBG is also the game that connected me with these awesome people that I’m happy to call friends now.

Here’s a little bit about them and us.

Scarlett

I was introduced to Scarlett by Ralu playing with her and her stream has become a frequent hangout for me. While I’m not her mod, I wanted to give her a shoutout here for always being a positive force in the PUBG community and for the fact that I met the next two on the list (and many more) in her custom games sessions!