My son is in love with video game streamers. When he isn’t allowed to be playing games, he likes to watch people playing games…which seems strange to me, until I realize I have spent much time watching my friends play games live. I’m guessing if I had YouTube when I was his age, I would be watching streamers too. So the next logical step, of course, would be to start streaming our own game play, right? Should be easy, right?
Well…it’s kind of easy. I have spent hours reading and watching things on how to stream your games. Some have been amazingly helpful and some have not been so helpful. So I decided to chronicle the move into streaming and share my finds and thoughts. Here we go!
What do I have to work with?
First things first, I am not a PC gamer. Never was…don’t seem to be now. I may look into something like League of Legends at some point, but not yet. Let’s focus on the consoles. I have the Xbox One, a PS4, and a Switch. My primary computer is a MacBook Air and I have access to a Blue Yeti, some Monoprice headphones, and games. I am trying to do this without spending any money, which makes it tricky.
What platform do you stream to?
Twitch? Mixer? YouTube? There is a lot of information online about each of these. Here are my quick thoughts.
Twitch
Lots of people here. Great tutorials for beginners. Looks good and is the place for people to stream games. I can make graphics for this one as there are templates galore. I can stream from the Xbox and the PS4 easily. Not sure about the Switch or any iOS devices. The issue is there are so many people here…would our little channel ever get noticed?
Mixer
Super easy to stream from the Xbox One, which makes sense as Mixer is a Microsoft product. Tried it and it is super easy. This is a contender. Looks like I could use it with my PS4 as well, but it would take some work.
YouTube
I have no idea how to stream to YouTube. I will look into it, but the hope is to take the streams we have and post them here. I will look into this one later.
So where are we at?
After some tinkering, I decided to focus on Twitch for now. I need to work on audio and how to get OBS (or something like it) to work with my setup, but one thing at a time. If you have a few moments, join us on Twitch!
