Re: We need more "stepmania" twitch streams
So streaming stepmania has a lot of problems
1. Quality of streams. The majority of people streaming stepmania stream at a pretty low quality, often 480p or lower. Quality matters. Your stream layout matters too. Make the game your focal point, and design everything else around that.
2. Player diversity. People play this game in a lot of different ways, there are a handful of low level players who stream pretty often, and obviously they struggle to draw viewers even more than the better ones. Couple this with StepMania pad streams, index, etc, and we get a really weird situation where people pretty much are only interested in watching the play style that they personally like, and its not easy to find a lot of streamers for the specific content you enjoy.
3. Chat interaction can only happen between songs. Very few players try to actively talk while playing, and this helps your viewer count a lot if you care about that kind of thing. This leads to people being dead silent during game play aside from the tapping, which will draw a lot of people who don't fully understand the skill involved to get pretty bored.
4. Mislabeling your streams. If you're streaming StepMania, change your game setting to say it. If you're streaming StepMania and label it as osu, or streaming something else and labeling it as StepMania, this hurts the people who have followed to StepMania as a game (which everyone should do btw). I don't know how popular the game following feature on Twitch is, but I use it all the time, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I couldn't tell you how many times I go to the Stepmania stream list, and click on a stream title that looks interesting only to find some guy playing league of legends instead. More descriptive stream titles would also help, but I'm guilty of that last part as well.
There's probably a number of other issues at hand as well, but these are the biggest problems. Resolving even a few of these would help a lot, but at the end of the day, the game just isn't very popular, and I doubt that even with a lot of dedication and better quality streams that we will see the game get much more viewership than it already has.
damn that ended up being more long winded than i wanted
oh, and cirno's stepmania streams don't count, he worked a long time in purely the speedrunning community to build up his stream, and he practically has a cult following that will watch him play anything, the best thing we can hope for out of this is for people to try to be streaming stepmania when he stops streaming it, this happened to me once and about 10-15 people ended up finding my channel after he went offline because they were interested in the game.
So streaming stepmania has a lot of problems
1. Quality of streams. The majority of people streaming stepmania stream at a pretty low quality, often 480p or lower. Quality matters. Your stream layout matters too. Make the game your focal point, and design everything else around that.
2. Player diversity. People play this game in a lot of different ways, there are a handful of low level players who stream pretty often, and obviously they struggle to draw viewers even more than the better ones. Couple this with StepMania pad streams, index, etc, and we get a really weird situation where people pretty much are only interested in watching the play style that they personally like, and its not easy to find a lot of streamers for the specific content you enjoy.
3. Chat interaction can only happen between songs. Very few players try to actively talk while playing, and this helps your viewer count a lot if you care about that kind of thing. This leads to people being dead silent during game play aside from the tapping, which will draw a lot of people who don't fully understand the skill involved to get pretty bored.
4. Mislabeling your streams. If you're streaming StepMania, change your game setting to say it. If you're streaming StepMania and label it as osu, or streaming something else and labeling it as StepMania, this hurts the people who have followed to StepMania as a game (which everyone should do btw). I don't know how popular the game following feature on Twitch is, but I use it all the time, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I couldn't tell you how many times I go to the Stepmania stream list, and click on a stream title that looks interesting only to find some guy playing league of legends instead. More descriptive stream titles would also help, but I'm guilty of that last part as well.
There's probably a number of other issues at hand as well, but these are the biggest problems. Resolving even a few of these would help a lot, but at the end of the day, the game just isn't very popular, and I doubt that even with a lot of dedication and better quality streams that we will see the game get much more viewership than it already has.
damn that ended up being more long winded than i wanted
oh, and cirno's stepmania streams don't count, he worked a long time in purely the speedrunning community to build up his stream, and he practically has a cult following that will watch him play anything, the best thing we can hope for out of this is for people to try to be streaming stepmania when he stops streaming it, this happened to me once and about 10-15 people ended up finding my channel after he went offline because they were interested in the game.
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