As many other people, I too have a list of artists who I stopped really “following” a while ago. Not because they changed in such a way for me to dislike their content (that’s the circular file), but because they just stopped updating.
Lately, the reason they’ve stopped updating has streamlined into a single factor. Almost all of them have started streaming.
Their art pages and blogs languish with content that was last updated a year ago. The banners promising consistent updates are turned into liars. Indeed anything that should be updated isn’t. There’s only one thing that changes. Inevitably there will be a Twitter feed somewhere on the site. And on this Twitter feed you’ll see a steady stream of updates. Most of these will be clips from their stream and a link to the source of those clips. And then occasionally a schedule for the upcoming streams and whatever games they will play on it.
If you get really lucky you’ll even get a tweet with a sketch page, because they haven’t drawn seriously in so long that they need to “rediscover their art style”. Just the one. And not on the site. Lost forever after a couple of months unless you have one of those mice that have freewheeling scroll.
Far be it from me to tell them what content they should do or when or how. But I can lament their trading one for the other. It’s not like streaming doesn’t involve effort. If you’ve been stuck in a local multi-player session waiting for a turn (which is something that people used to do) you’ll know that it can get really boring watching other people play even when you like them. To be a successful game streamer you have to cut through that and do it in such a way that people will find you entertaining. More so than all of the other people doing it at the time.
But at the same time one can lament their transition from one medium to the other. Especially since it’s much more difficult to squeeze a multi-hour stream in the schedule. Putting it on as background noise can be done sometimes, but not always. It’s hard to do productive things with someone really excited that they cleared a particularly difficult section of a game and they’re celebrating loudly in your ears.
Still. If they feel that it’s better/ more entertaining / more lucrative for them to do one thing over the other instead of balancing them, go for it. May your simps be generous but not to their detriment. May your stans not be as creepy as Marshall’s. I’ll be sitting right here if you ever decide to exercise your creativity like you used to.
Also, just throwing this out there, streaming the drawing process and then uploading the finished art is also an option. Maybe double dipping on that occasionally will open a new audience for you…just saying.
