Thoughts on Speedrunning, Community Manager, Twitch

Thoughts on Speedrunning, Community Manager, Twitch
So I’ve been involved with speedrunning for about 2 years now, in some small form or another, which is a really crazy thought, but combined with following it and the smash community for the last year pretty extensively, I have a few hopes for the speedrunning manager as a whole. This will likely come across as very rambling, but I’ll try to organize it as best I can. If you feel I misspoke or said something wrong, please correct me, or if you want to ask me questions, my skype is dghoul2.
This is excluding traditional “e-sports” since I don’t know as much about them, and I’ve heard (entirely secondhand) that getting partnered as one of these is by far the hardest.
There are two types of streams. There are “event streams” and there are “private streams”. In case these aren’t clear, the event streams are something like RPGLimitBreak, GamesDoneQuick or VGBootCamp, while a private stream would be like mine, Romscouts, Dabuz’s etc.
Almost every major events stream (i.e. averages 100 viewers per event) is partnered with Twitch. This is pretty easy on their end; the events will draw the necessary viewers, they don’t usually stream much other than large events etc. However, I also believe that on average, there’s much less likelihood of getting subs, unless it’s either huge (VGBootCamp) or very niche (RPGLimitBreak).  Regardless, the viewer counts and relationship with Twitch are big enough where these streams will get partner as soon as they hit decent viewer counts because they’re always going to be reliable.
Before D1 was added to Twitch as a community manager for Smash, I’d have argued that it was by far the hardest subset on twitch to get partner as a “personal” stream.  There are a few contributing factors here: the “meta” for which players were great wasn’t set in stone so close to Wii U’s launch, and Melee was still on the upswing/players weren’t really taking streaming as seriously. Since then though, you see many more partnered streamers in the 60-70 average viewer range; however, these are very high likelihood of having people subscribe, since it’s a way to “cheer for the player” and as a way to get more knowledge. You still have your megastreamers like Nairo and Mango, but the number of  streamers in the 50-60 range with sub is much, much higher. I remember Dabuz being rejected once despite being at that number and being in the likely top 5 in the game at the time (since then, I’d argue his stock has risen, but he still sits between 50-90 viewers when streaming Smash 4).
Why did this change? I think part of it is that Smash players are safe. Twitch is very confident that if they pick up another game as a main stream, it’s likely to be something that their audience is going to be interested in. There’s also very little chance of total defection; it’s not terribly common for Smash streamers to stop playing Smash competitively and start, for example, speedrunning or CS full time.
Getting partner as a speedrunner is, in my experience, by far the hardest current “sub community” on Twitch without partner. I see viewer numbers for friends streams that are well and above what I see as the bare minimum for many other communities (Some of this is of course, personal bias. I can only see what I see, and a lot of what I see are personal friends. To use an example, two very good friends of mine, Sk84uhlivin and CriticalCyd both pull very consistently 80+ viewers, with the former often sitting comfortably between 90-140 on most FF12 streams).
That said, I actually don’t think this is necessarily Twitch’s fault; speedrunning and the communities surrounding it are incredibly fickle. I can routinely get minimum 60 viewers doing a Persona 4 Golden, with no help from anybody. With any help, that number is often at the 110 range, which is commonly where partnered streamers sit. However, if I boot up, say Catherine, my viewer count will sit in the high 10s, peaking at maybe 25. Again, this is an accepted thing on my end. The point being that speedrunner view counts are very dependant on the games played. Sure, if I streamed nothing but Persona 4, I believe I would get partner probably fairly quickly, but only if Twitch believed I would continue to stream nothing but Persona 4 Golden to make sure my view and sub counts will pay for their investment. That’s not wrong of them, that’s smart business. This is the risk of partnering with a speedrunner; if they get tired of a marquee game or series, their viewer base may decline back below the acceptable standard for a partnered streamer.  I believe this effect is why getting partner as a speedrunner is so difficult; you’re incredibly reliant on the games you run for viewers and support. Many viewers are there for the speedrun/game/series, and not necessarily for the runner themselves.

I also think this is why some runners have had so much difficulty getting partner over others. Because there is such an emphasis on games in what speedrunners run, there is direct competition between runners at times and only so much available sub money to go around; Twitch likely at some point thinks that a majority of the money for say RPG runners is allocated until a streamer goes out of the way to prove otherwise. I’m not sure if this is just a perception or not; it may actually not be the way internal things work, but I think it’s logical.
As further evidence Let’s Players/variety streamers (For this purpose, a streamer that is playing all of their games with minimal competitive intent) have probably a slightly easier time viewer count wise (but by far the hardest in the discovery phase), which I think further supports the theory. If you’re going to follow a let’s player, there’s a very good chance you’re enjoying them, their commentary and their taste in games and not specifically that they happen to be playing Kingdom Hearts for the next week. They’re going to be able to hold a steadier viewer count regardless of what game they’re playing and because the reason to view is the player, not the game, I believe that subs would be more likely than for every other game type, likely making them very safe to give partner at relatively low viewer levels.
I don’t know of an easy fix other than working with speedrunners that are intending to get partner and educating them on exactly what they’re missing. The communication stream is a bit one way at the moment; we send them an application, they send back a response. I would hope  the speedrunning community partner also works to find out what Twitch is exactly looking for, and trying to find ways to make the model work better for speedrunners ( I believe that the way speedrunning works is probably the most ‘counter’ to the current twitch meta. We are very hard for Twitch because we are a large niche [oxymorons woo] with a different set of needs than what most other streamers are looking for.
As an aside, probably the coolest development in speedrunning has been when indie developers talk to and work with speedrunners of their various games. It’s really cool to hear that Munchakoopas is a beta tester for new features on Shovel Knight or that feedback from HDL was one of the driving forces behind the mechanics of how Milla’s shield works in Freedom Planet (one of my favorite platforming speedruns if you haven’t seen it). I’d love to see connections come via Twitch to reach out to more “AAA” indies for cross promotion or potentially AAA developers.  I think it would be beneficial for all parties involved, although we might be too small time for true AAA developers.

So yeah, that’s basically it. I hope that was understandable as well as also not coming off as preachy. I’m sure I have a lot of details wrong, so if there are corrections, feel free to let me know. I also want to apologize if I mention somebody and they’re not happy about it; this wasn’t the intent of this at all. Thank you for reading, and I’d like to hear if you have anything interesting to say about it.

Last minute edit: Speedrunning and Twitch are not incompatible by any means, I just see that we each have goals that sometimes run counter to the others best wishes. I'm hoping in the near future these get sorted out and there are fewer disappointed runners that feel they are incredibly close but never actually getting to partner status.