DarkViperAU
Name Origins
His original 5th Grade Hotmail account name had been GameViper3 because while he was setting it up, he was watching The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes during a scene where one of the characters cried out ‘No one messes with The Viper!’ and he decided to go with that. He then added on ‘Gamer’, because ‘Viper’ was already taken, as was ‘GameViper’.
A few years later, he joined a private World of Warcraft server, where he was randomly assigned the name ‘Baine.’ A few years after that, he moved to the retail servers and had to choose a new name, so e went with Darkbaine. He later has to come up with a new Hotmail account name and decided to combine these two into ‘DarkViper88,’ with the ‘88’ being their because he felt it would be easier for him to remember. He later changed ‘88’ to ‘AU’ when he learned that ‘88’ was associated with Neo-Nazis. He has stuck with it since then.
Gaming Origins
DarkViperAU has been playing video games since childhood, and also played IRL soccer, cricket and ten-pin bowling in his spare time.
He discovered Twitch in 2014, when he was searching for a platform that would be streaming a Hearthstone (HS) tournament live. Through that stream, he discovered itsHafu and followed him so that he could watch him later. From there, he discovered other streamers and became familiar with the Twitch community and then the speed-running community.
After high school, he worked part-time while gambling as his main form of income. He was living with his mom at the time, so didn’t feel that he was really doing anything risky. He chose to drop gambling when he went to study Psychology at university, as he realized that he was addictive and that gambling with his lifesavings was very irresponsible.
Professional Gaming
He started streaming his Warcraft III custom map gameplays for fun occasionally a few months after discovering Twitch. Over time, he became more and more fascinated by the idea of learning a facets of a game so well that he would be able to exploit them and compete to achieve the fastest time, and so began searching for a game that he could attempt to speedrun.
One of the streamers that he would regularly watch was Witwix, who went through a period of attempting to speedrun GTA V with 80% completion and no mission skips. DarkViperAU had bought the game prior to this, but hadn’t actually played it yet, and decided to try it out casually after watching Witwix. He found that he enjoyed it and decided to make it his game of choice for speedrunning, with his first attempt lasting for ~10+ hours for around 80 viewers with a host. He continued attempting to break his records and slowly built up a following.
His language isn’t so clean.
Income
According to his Twitch overlay, DarkViperAU has ~2,700 subscribers. As he regularly attracts over 1,000 viewers, this should earn him at least $9,450 USD per month before he receives further revenue from other sources such as tiered subscribers, tips, Twitch cheer bit donations, merchandise sales, advertisements and sponsorships.
Streaming Hours
He doesn’t have a set schedule but tends to stream daily for 8+ hours per session.
Quotes
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If you have been streaming for a prolonged amount of time and you haven’t achieved any success, you should either stop streaming or do something else to potentially bring an audience to Twitch. As in, maybe discoverability isn’t working for you, [so] make content somewhere else. A new platform and advertise your Twitch. If you do something consistently for a long time and it doesn’t work out, you need to change. If what you are producing isn’t of a value that people would want to consume it even if they saw it, it doesn’t matter how discoverable you are. You need to work on yourself, your content and seek other avenues of discoverability.
Sources
Gaming Setup
Streaming Setup
