Gaming
Games
To this GTA streamer, roleplay is a refuge from rocket launchers
We interviewed a successful Twitch streamer about his rise, how he's making a living for his family and what he sees as the future of the GTA V community.
In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that Felix Kjellberg, better known by his alias, PewDiePie, made approximately $4 million a year in ads by recording himself playing video games and uploading the videos to YouTube. His total revenue in 2014 was $7.4 million.
In hindsight, these news reports changed how the general public viewed YouTubers and livestreamers. What was once perceived as frivolous slackerism is now perceived as a lifehack. But the truth is more sobering. The overwhelming majority of YouTube gamers and streamers are either middle class or hanging on; players like PewDiePie are the rare exception. Success is relative.
"There's a lot of people who play music," said popular Twitch streamer SilentSentry in an interview with Red Bull Games. "But a realistic example of a full-time musician is someone who is doing gig after gig within a 50-mile radius of his or her house, making enough money to pay rent. He's supporting himself on his music, but he's not selling out Madison Square Garden. He's not a rock star."
"Streaming is the same way," he continued. "People will see someone getting support, and they'll assume the streamer is getting a whole lot of monetisation. But I was making a part-time salary off of streaming [at first], and it was inconsistent. Any other job you can say, 'Here's my salary. We can budget for next month.' But with streaming, I don't know what I'm making next month. The only guaranteed amount is my subscription number."
SilentSentry is 28 years old and based out of the United States. He's a successful, full-time streamer, but it's been a complicated journey to get to this point; he had to grow up quickly at the age of 18, when his girlfriend informed him that she was pregnant. He left high school to earn his GED, and he worked full-time in a factory to support his family while his wife (he married his girlfriend) attained a degree in Interactive and Graphic Design.
Then, it was his turn to go to college while his wife worked; he pursued a paramedic career path. He was 24 years old; his daughter was in school, and finally, he could focus on himself.
"I went from working 60-hour weeks to going to school for 20 hours a week," said SilentSentry. "For the first time since I found out I was going to be a father, I was by myself at home. I decided to start gaming again. And the mental benefits alone were great. It felt meditative."
He began watching Twitch; prior, he assumed it was predominantly for esports tournaments and League of Legends professionals. He didn't know there were multiple small communities based around streamers' personalities. Professional gaming skill wasn't a prerequisite in this realm, especially if the streamer didn't market himself as an expert. He decided to give it a whirl, and took notes on other streamers' approaches.
"I was looking at what not to do," said SilentSentry. "At the time, the biggest flaw that stood out to me was 'dead air.' I didn't like it when I clicked on a stream and five minutes went by without the player saying a word. That might be acceptable if the streamer was exceptional at the game – if that's what drew people to him [or her in the first place.]. But a lot of times, that wasn't the case."
"What's the point of turning on a camera and hoping people will show up if you're not putting in effort towards being entertaining?" he continued. "For me, if I don't do or say anything for a minute, it's too long."
Streaming went well; within two weeks of his debut, he had 300 followers who watched him play open-world survival game DayZ. He stood out; most of the other DayZ streams were combat-oriented. In contrast, SilentSentry enjoyed the human interaction. He loved teaming up with strangers to survive. These temporary, yet unique relationships enthralled him.
He worked hard to get 300 followers, and he joked that if he reached 1000 followers, he'd shave his head. The news spread around Twitch, and soon, he had 4000 followers. He kept to his word; he shaved his head on the stream. And the next time he signed on, he had 300 people already waiting to watch him play.
From there, it took about month for him to begin partnering with Twitch, which turned his part-time gaming job into a full-time job. His wife designed the channel's overlay and emoticons, which gave the entire presentation a slick, professional sheen. He also began accepting tips. For the first several weeks, he had no PayPal link; his followers kept asking him to put one up.
"I've never once asked for a tip or a follow," said SilentSentry. "These people are taking time out of their day to watch me play video games. They're smart enough to know they can subscribe, tip, or follow. I don't have to constantly remind them. If I've earned it, or if they think I've earned it, they'll do it."
His Twitch stream is far more varied, gameplay-wise, than when he first started. He has a loyal audience who will watch him and appreciate him no matter what game he is playing. And a major part of his game rotation is GTA V, although he isn't a big fan of GTA Online.
"The official Grand Theft Auto Online experience is lacking," said SilentSentry. "It's heavily based on grinding in-game money for things that aren't adding much to the game. The typical experience you're getting in GTA Online is a bunch of young kids shooting rocket launchers at each other and driving million dollar sports cars. That's not realistic. It's immersion breaking."
"There's plenty of people who want to run around with rocket launchers," he admitted. "But there's also a subgroup of people that loves [to focus on] the environment. The game is beautiful, but when I played through the story, I never stopped to look at the storefront displays, where if you walk by, you can hear the air conditioner's generator in your left ear. Someone at Rockstar spent a significant amount of time building that scenery, but no one is stopping to appreciate it."
That's why SilentSentry only plays GTA on whitelisted, modified servers, which allow him to roleplay as different characters. Currently, the most popular GTA streams are roleplay streams. SilentSentry has played several different characters, such as hippie or an aspiring musician, and he'll get lost in the stories he creates. He'll do funny voices to accompany his characters. And he'll simply live his virtual life – sometimes interesting, sometimes mundane, often hilarious – to the delight of his fans.
"Roleplay has the mentality where instead of immediately putting on a bulletproof vest and leaving my customised cool apartment, I'm going to go to my fridge to eat a snack," said SilentSentry. "It's about slowing things down."
"It limits players to the expectations of real life," he continued. "If you have gun, it's likely that you own a pistol and it's concealed, and you're probably not going to pull it out unless you feel really threatened. Even if you're a gangbanger, you might rob a gas station, but you're going to be doing it with a pistol. You're going to get $300 from the cash register. You're not going to be robbing the FBI building with a rocket launcher to get a million dollars for your yacht."
He recalls a particularly fond in-game roleplay memory, when one of his characters, Lil Squirt, gave his first live performance at nightclub Tequi-la-la, His little concert may not have had the epic sprawl of a bank heist. But that was a trade-off for something more intimate and personal.
"Never did I think I'd experience second-hand stage fright, but here I was," said SilentSentry. "If I was playing Grand Theft Auto [the standard way], I would have never even known this building [Tequi-la-la] existed."
Rockstar Games has never publicly commented on the roleplay servers. But their silence is an endorsement by omission; certainly, they have the means to litigate these communities out of existence, if they wanted to.
GTA V will celebrate its 5th anniversary this October. That same month, the company will shift its focus to Red Dead Redemption 2, which they're releasing on October 26. Though they've been cagey about it, we can almost certainly expect an online multiplayer with the scale and sprawl of Grand Theft Auto Online. And it would be incredible, particularly for streamers like SilentSentry, if the diversity and intricacy of the roleplay matched the diversity and intricacy of the landscape.
What if you could complete missions not as an outlaw, but as a blacksmith? Or as a piano player in a saloon? Or as an animal herder on a small ranch? The possibilities abound.
