A couple of years ago, (maybe two couple) while looking for content I enjoyed on YouTube, I stumbled upon Andre Rebelo’s channel, you may know him as Typical Gamer, this young lad just sat in his room and streamed Grand Theft Auto on his YouTube account and didn’t have to work! ever, at least that’s what I thought at the time. I wanted that.
I remember searching up how much he made on YouTube after watching some of his streams in 240p, this was way later after he had finished streaming since good internet… There was never a set number, but I knew he was making bucks, a few years later, my man would go on to buy a Lamborgini, and boy, I wanted that.
“Nigel you love gaming, you play NFS: Most wanted like a boss, you’ve already beat vice city to 100pc completion in that ka crowded cyber cafe (Thanks to Bernard for never charging me), just work hard and you can do this, you never have to work a day in your life,” Nigel told Nigel.
Hours passed, I consumed more TG, I looked for more channels to watch, Code Zero Gaming, Bay Area Buggs, there was a lot of content, gaming was becoming a career for so many people. Days passed, weeks, months became years, it is now 2022 and I have never started that gaming channel.
Why I don’t Game For a Living
Until 2 years ago, I couldn’t afford to even get a working laptop. In order to start Techspace Africa, I got a free laptop from a friend, Blaze. That laptop couldn’t game, heck, it couldn’t even handle chrome with a few tabs open. So yeah I have never had enough money to go on this wild adventure of mine.
You need like two good gaming pc’s to stream, that is without counting all other accessories, bad internet, expensive and unreliable electricity, Africa has almost zero servers for online gaming so pathetic pings and absolutely pathetic gameplay experience, there were a lot of factors.
Some of you will say, ‘Nigel you don’t need the highest of the end equipment to game’ and this is true, I tried to buy a budget PC and build my own gaming rig, and it was perfect, I could get my 30-40fps playing some GTA 5, but try to open OBS, this was not going to work, worse even, I had to sell it to buy some food when I had nowhere else to look.
Asking for support from someone to start a gaming career would’ve been fruitless, before Ninja and Dream, before TG, and before Pewdiepie, you had to want to be a lawyer or a pilot, if that was too ambitious at least try to be a teacher, these were the jobs and if you wanted anything else, good luck, you’d be used as the bad example your extended family told their kids about. so that was out of the question.
I was never into console gaming, nobody I was watching was streaming console gameplay. I try to play some Ghost Recon and Warzone here and there now that I could afford to buy a PS4, but that isn’t content I want to put out there.
To be a successful streamer, you have to be really good at a game or have a likable personality, or ideally both, I’m not good at that, I can barely talk. Like I said, in my mind, I thought I’d never have to work, in fact, it would’ve been a lot of work and even if I had the money I do not know that I would have gamed for a living. However, I will never know until I try. right? right? right??
Anyways to cut long the short story, my gaming career was stillborn, I do still hold the dream somewhere, and maybe when I can afford to I’ll do it just for fun, speaking of which, I test out a few games here and there on the mobile devices I review on here and so I started a Twitch account where I can game and stream, maybe I’ll gauge how good of an entertainer I would have been, or maybe this is where I bury this dream.
Yesterday I streamed on Twitch and made a friend. My first follower, we then went on to play duos vs squads and won. And my little ambitions from a long ass time ago to play games for a living came rushing back. Being born in Kenya was a mistake. pic.twitter.com/hyBjJwEm2f
— N¡gel (@NigelJr_) February 3, 2022
Do Kenyans consume E-sports? who would be my audience? English is not my first language!
