Potential Interest in Streaming/YT
Discussion Alright, so I know there's hundreds of posts like this, but I'm looking for some advice. A quick rundown - I'm 37 and just left my job as a chef. It was an interesting career and I enjoyed my time with it, but I've never really had that ambition for my life. With that, I've grown accustomed to working 12-14 hour days.
My wife and many of my friends have always suggested I try streaming because I'm very social. Personally, I've always found streamers pretty cringey and I very rarely watch streamers. Something about the overreacting and pandering to viewers has always given me pause.
Thing is, right now my wife is making very good money, we have quite a bit in savings, and she's pushing me to be a stay-at-home husband for a bit. I get it, because for our entire relationship my hours have been nuts and now she gets to see me all day and eat my cooking, y'know? It sounds wonderful, but even as a degenerate gamer, I find myself getting pretty bored easily throughout the week. So this is actually somewhat of a compromise I'm considering.
My biggest issues at the moment are:
My wife works from home in our office, where my PC also is. She runs a team and is constantly in meetings, so I would have work something out in the living room or something, which she would not love. That or limit my streaming/recording window to after 6pm, thus kind of defeating the purpose of being home. She goes to bed quite early, around 11pm and I'm usually up until 2-4am, so I guess that's a solid 3-5 hours, but is this enough to try and pull this off?
The chance of success is pretty slim, I get that. Most streamers I've been checking out seems to have just been in the right place, right time, or put a decade of work into it before it started to pay off. So with luck being a huge factor, I'm curious about the investment side of it. I get that immediate ick feeling when I see a stream with low quality video/audio, so I know I would have to get some premium equipment and I don't even have a baseline for this. I can afford it, sure, but is it a great idea to tank $5k into microphones and cameras and whatnot with such a low return possibility? Should I do something more incremental, because that doesn't seem wise if I can indeed afford it. This stuff has very recently become a real consideration so forgive me for not doing any research into this specifically because I'm sure tons of people ask this.
Is YouTube a requirement for new players? I have zero editing know-how, but it seems like streaming on its own, without an established audience, is just a way to waste time and money.
Since I'm never actually on Twitch, I'm curious how y'all feel about personalities. I always roll my eyes and physically cringe when I hear people overreact on twitch. I straight up refuse to do that sorta thing. Like I'm not gonna be clip farming or click baiting, if anything I'm more likely to argue with my viewers lol. I'm a charming person but I don't know how that's gonna translate to streaming and talking to the wall basically.
When starting out, I just can't picture people watching me silently play games. So I guess what you want to do is "pretend" like you have an audience and you're speaking to them. Any advice with that actually insane behavior?
I don't know why I'm posting this here. I guess I just want to chitchat about it with people who probably know a lot more about it than me. I'm between doing something hyper focused like a Pokemon channel and getting ready for gen 10 (I'm very knowledgeable but actually trash in competitive) or just doing whatever I'm in the mood for that day