Are you ready to learn the difference between gaming as a hobby vs being a full time gamer and how to get more views on your YouTube gaming channel in 2020 & beyond? I'm Jerry Banfield, the producer of this viral League of Legends video that came out of nowhere.
No one was following me on League of Legends. I hardly made any videos on it.
I did a little live stream that went viral and got hundreds of people watching every League of Legends stream I did within a few months.
I've also been a gamer on Facebook, Twitch, and Mixer with 1500 people watching me play Battlefield at once along with thousands of people watching me fail to Clutch games of Blackout.
This blog will help you immensely to grow your gaming following. First and foremost is a question to ask yourself honestly.
Do you just want to do gaming as a hobby or do you really want to make gaming the main thing you do?
Answering this question will guide everything else you are doing from here on out because your answer to this question will determine what actions you take next. The reason for asking this question is to determine your level of investment and commitment.
Gaming as a Hobby
If you're just gaming as a hobby like, “Well, I'm not ready to give up the rest of my life to go for being a gamer. I just want to get a few more people to watch my videos”.
I'll give you some tips that'll be helpful for you here and I've got great news. You can relax. You can relax if you're just gaming as a hobby. It doesn't matter how many people are watching.
It only matters how many people are watching from either an ego and reputation point of view, which doesn't matter if you're gaming as a hobby.
By gaming hobby I mean you’re doing it for fun because you just enjoy it. You want to put your gameplay out there and help people. If that's the reason you're doing it, it doesn't matter about views.
I can't stress this enough because it's ridiculous to get obsessed with how many people are watching if you're just playing around and having fun.
If you're trying to make money and if you're hoping to do gaming full-time then it does make sense to focus constantly on building your viewership and your community. I'll give you a lot of tips here that are helpful for that.
The key is to answer this question honestly and to really look around at your life and think about what you are willing to give up to get these results and a lot more. What are you willing to give up? Are you willing to give up your job and move home with your parents?
What are you willing to give up if you want to do gaming as a real full-time thing?
I personally was doing gaming for over a year in two different periods as my primary activity and I decided I wasn't willing to give up more of my life to go further into gaming. What it really takes to do exceptional with gaming, I will layout it to you now.
Here's what you really need to invest if you want to really grow your views, build your audience and make exceptional videos.
If you want to do gaming full-time, you need to do it full-time. Act as if you're doing it full-time and do it full time. This is something I was not willing to continue doing. You need to be playing video games 40+ hours a week on a live stream. This is full-time.
If you want to make money and you want to get your views as high as possible, you need to be around, to be visible and you need to be online a lot. With family and business, this is where I was unwilling to continue gaming.
I saw that all I needed to do to reach the next level in gaming was to go from 20 hours a week to 40 hours a week and I literally didn't need to do anything else. I looked at it and said I'm not willing to do that.
I don't want to do gaming 40 hours a week. It's a full-time job. I've worked about 30 hours a week for years and I see that the top gamers are consistently live or playing games and recording videos for 40+ hours a week.
Now, you might be ok with that part. You might say, “Ok, well I got a job and I can put 40 hours a week into gaming”.
I'll give you the next part if you really want to get more views and really want to be able to do gaming full-time.
You need to make outstanding videos like this where there's ideally nothing else just like it out there or that's much better than whatever else is out there.
A lot of you might be able to play 40 hours of games a week. There are lots of times in my life I've been able to play 40 hours of gaming a week prior to getting married and having children.
This is generally tough for people because you don't have much experience making videos and you do not understand what people are looking for and combine all that with a willingness to do it before people are watching.
Let me put that in a little simpler terms. Most of you that come to me for help, you make videos just like everyone else's. What you see about this video, this is not a video that was like everyone else's.
I paid a coach something like $40 or $50 an hour to coach me on my Livestream. I've researched, found a professional league of Legends player and paid him $50 an hour to coach me on my Livestream.
No one else that I had seen did that and not only that but I got a title from my experience as a digital marketer. I got a title that was very attractive to people browsing. I literally asked the same question that I had in my head.
I was thinking, “Can I just pay a pro coach to help me get out of bronze in League of Legends?” I literally did a video on the exact challenging problem that I was struggling with and this thing went completely viral on its own.
Now you can do this for almost any video game. If you're playing Call of Duty, find a really good Call of Duty player and pay them. Maybe they're a streamer, pay them. Pay them to play with you or pay them to coach you.
This might take some effort to find the right person. I went on a League of Legends coaching website to find the coach. It took some significant effort to set the stream up so that the coach could see my gameplay close enough to real-time with a minimal delay that the coach could give me live feedback and coaching.
It took some time to set it up and get it on Skype so that the coaches' audio could be recorded live while I was playing. In order to do that, you more than likely need an outstanding streaming setup.
If you really want to get more views gaming, you need to act like you are already a full-time gamer if that's what you want to do.
Now, if you just want to do gaming as a hobby, forget about the views. Just make whatever videos you feel like making. Play whenever you feel like playing. Stop thinking about your views and start focusing on the value you're giving in your live streams and the fun you're having.
When I was gaming as a hobby, it was great. I didn't care about how many people were watching. I just put a bunch of videos out there and then I celebrated when somebody watched me play.
I just played around with it and tested things out because I was doing it as a part of my business. However, after this video went viral in 2016, I got the idea that maybe I can be a full-time gamer now.
I had just lost my primary income source giving me a ton of free time and I thought I could be a full-time gamer now. I just lost the main thing I was doing. I've got an audience that's coming in for free that wants more videos and I start playing League of Legends every day.
Here's a little insight for you. There's a big difference between doing gaming as a hobby versus doing gaming full-time and it may not be one you can see until you fully dive into it.
If you just have this fantasy that it's so great doing gaming full-time, let me tell you from experience. I enjoyed gaming full-time less than I enjoy doing my regular digital marketing and online advertising business on a daily basis and that was a shocking realization to me.
If you really want to get the most views gaming, you need to put videos out that are either and/or combined with as many of these possible. Outstanding video ideas which sometimes you just can't get to until you try a bunch of bad ideas.
I tried it for years before this with gaming as a hobby, just playing around with different video ideas. This one just happened to really work and go viral. If you're willing to experiment and try different things every single day, you're willing to go farther than other people are willing to go, then you can be a full-time gamer.
However, if you just want to play video games a few hours a week, you have no chance at being a full-time gamer unless you just do it, enjoy it, love it and forget about the views. If you focus on what you're getting constantly and you're only doing it for the views, you won't have fun with it and you'll stress it out and.
This is what I got to be doing because I hit a barrier and I saw that I don't want to do it. I'm not interested or available. It doesn't work for my life to live stream for more than 20 hours for most weeks.
I saw that the other gamers who had huge thriving communities were growing quickly by streaming at least 30 if not 40 plus hours a week and releasing a video. They dedicated their lives to gaming whereas I was playing around doing lots of other stuff too.
It's all about dedication if you really want to get more views on your channel. It's about thinking about what you can give.
Can you give a video that is unlike anything else people have seen?
That's challenging because there are a lot of other people playing video games trying to make viral videos.
1- Are you willing to go farther than anyone else is willing to go?
2- Are you willing to spend hundreds of maybe thousands of dollars to pay somebody to coach you to get your game on point?
3- Are you willing to donate a bunch on other streams to get attention and to play with other gamers that are live-streaming having a big audience?
There are a lot of gamers. You can simply show up, donate, and support every day and you'll be able to get in-game with them as I did. I donated and gave more to others than I made myself as a gamer because I donated tens of thousands to other gamers.
If you want to get more views, it's really simple. You make the decision that you're going to do this either out of joy as a hobby or do it full-time. Once you decide that I'm going to do it full-time, you might need to quit your job.
You might need to give up where you live but if you really want to be a gamer that bad, give up the other stuff, let go and take a leap of faith. When I started my business online, I wanted to do my business so badly that I was unwilling to take time to do anything else.
I quit a job that had health insurance that had a salary. Thousands of dollars a month that cost me to quit my job and the job was only 20 hours a week. I couldn’t stand to do that job anymore because it took time for me to do business.
If you want to be a gamer that gets the most views, you need to cut everything else out of your life that's taking up time that you could be putting into gaming.
If you've got a relationship that's not very good with a partner, you might need to cut that out until you find a partner who's willing to support you as a gamer because having a partner that supports someone who Livestreams and is a gamer, that is kind of a niche partnership.
Not every partner is up for being with someone who plays a lot of video games as the main thing they do and I'm glad my wife was able to be with me during that phase.
The best part about what I'm suggesting is that you get to try out immediately the full result of what you want. If your fantasy is to be a full-time gamer then start doing it today.
Worst case scenario, you'll realize that you don't want to do this and that fantasy will be out of your mind and you can do something else. As soon as I saw that it was time for me to be a full-time gamer, I just went for it and then I did it long enough to get tired of it.
I had great things happen on my streams. On one of my live streams, I got the number one leaderboard spot on a new Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Zombies the Revelations map.
I had the highest round on the day the game came out and I planned it exactly that way. I pictured it exactly and I executed exactly what I planned on doing and I did it all live. It's been fun and yet the day-to-day grind of gaming has got to be no fun. It's got to feel limiting.
In fact, I knew it was time to quit gaming when I got tired of learning. I got tired of watching other people's tutorials. I got to a place where I didn't want to learn and grow in gaming any more and that's where I stopped.
Even if you decide to do full-time gaming and you realize it's not for you, then that's good. You're ready to move forward and do something else. If you're just gaming as a hobby, forget how many views you're getting.
I've said this a bunch of times so it really sinks in because if you're just gaming as a hobby, you don't need a view and if you're trying to do it as a hobby to transition to doing it full-time, in my opinion, you're wasting your time.
Just go straight to do it full-time immediately and you might get results better than you could have realistically imagined.
I've seen people who just went for gaming full-time and they quit their jobs relatively quickly as soon as they saw the audience come in. Now, it might take you a long time to build an audience and to build views.
If you really want to get more views, it's a question of how much are you willing to do? How much do you enjoy doing what you're doing?
If you just love gaming, you've got a message to share and you are great at a game then just play the game. Act like you're full-time. All this mental stuff is way more important than the actual details of it and that's why I've given you this here.
Outside of just being a lot online and streaming a bunch, you really need to do tutorials on games. You need to put tutorials out first or you need to put your tutorials out that are way better than someone else's.
If you put tutorials out after someone's already taught that, you will get a fraction of the views.
If you put tutorials out where you're the very first person that has a tutorial on that, you will be able to get a ton of views and I've got bad news for you in some ways. There are a lot of gamers that are full-time and have incredible systems to put out tutorials sometimes before games are even released.
If you want to be able to get out of the best tutorials on gaming, it'll take innovation, commitment, and consistency. I got out several tutorials that racked up lots of views because I was ready. My filming system was fast and I got out tutorials often that weren't even that good or complete but I got them out right away.
I simply took other people's tutorials or learned stuff in the game and made a better, longer, and more detailed version of what was out there so that I could get the best-detailed tutorial out first. If you can do that for a specific game, that can help you a lot.
You might need to change the game you play in order to get the most viewers and this is something that burned me out of gaming for a year and a half. I got lots of views playing League of Legends on YouTube.
Almost anything else, I did not get that many views but here's what was ridiculous. I didn't even like playing League of Legends. I had almost no skill at League of Legends. Whereas, I've got a lot of skills at Call of Duty, Zombies, and Battlefield.
I've got a lot of skill in those first-person shooters. Well, League of Legends, that's where I was getting the views.
Many of the streamers I've seen built their audiences playing Fortnite.
However, just playing Fortnite once everybody else is playing Fortnight is not likely to work either. You need to jump on wherever there's a vacancy needed for a gaming streamer and tutorial creator which is constantly moving and changing.
When Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Blackout first came out, there were tons of opportunities to build an audience in Blackout. That has dwindled a lot and there's always some new games.
I wasn't willing to switch to paying to play Apex Legends to get more viewers. This is why it's important to assess your commitment upfront. If you're just willing to do a gaming hobby, you're probably not willing to switch up games and play a new game for 40 hours a week.
But if intending to do it full-time then the willingness you need to be able to play whatever game is best for you to play on that specific day and if you're willing to play that specific game on that specific day and you're willing to do that over and over again then you've got a great shot to get more views. It all goes back to your level of commitment.
I appreciate the chance to share my experience here with you as a former gamer that did gaming full-time for about a year and a half as a part of my online business that had a lot of success in gaming.
Millions of people have watched my gaming videos and today I don't care about it. Passion won out. I am not excited about the idea of playing video games.
The idea of ordering an Xbox and trying to play games again and doing that as my main thing sounds like a job.
Thus, I hope this experience is helpful for you to get the most views on your gaming channel and to guide you into the right place rather you're just gaming as a hobby.
I have friends that just play gaming as a hobby. They don't really care about getting views and they have fun. Their audiences seem to grow hard that much, but they have fun hanging out with their friends doing a live stream.
I have played with people who decided to follow exactly what I shared here that I'm going to go all-in on being a full-time gamer and for some of them, the audience didn't materialize and for others, the audience appeared out of almost nowhere and they capitalized on any opportunity.
The final tip I'll give you is to use Restream because when you use Restream, it will allow you to be live on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Mixer, Twitter and any other new gaming streaming platforms that come up like Dlive.
You want to be live in as many places as possible because on any given day, followers may come to you from unexpected angles. I've got more followers on Mixer lately than anywhere else which just seems crazy to me.
Thus, you want to be able to show up in as many different places as possible. I've got a playlist covering that.
I hope this is helpful for you and I trust when it is, you'll leave a like and hit the subscribe button if you haven't already.
I also recommend to be in a support group. If you want to do something like gaming full-time online, you need a support group of people who can listen to you, hear when you're frustrated, who understand what you're going through and I am available.
This is the main thing I'm doing now. I've got a support group where we have daily video calls. We've got hundreds of video courses. We're here to help you continue to learn to evolve and grow.
Think about it this way. If you are intending to be a full-time gamer the cost is $48 a month or $1,000 for life. If you're intending to do something like me (a full-time gamer), you must be able to afford $48 a month to support your growth, learning, connections, networking and your continued development as an entrepreneur online.
If that sounds like something you just can't do and rather it's with me or with some streaming service like Restream, you have to have money to put in to investing in and taking your business to the next level.
This is a great way for you to do it where you can talk to me, other YouTubers and entrepreneurs online who can help you with what you're doing and can mentor you and help you grow over time.
You may also like to read this blog: How to Get More Views on a YouTube Gaming Channel in 2020 — Viral Video Case Studies
Thank you for reading to the end of this blog. I love you. You're awesome and I'll see you in the next post.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/gaming-as-a-hobby-vs-full-time/