For aspiring streamers, building a community on Twitch can seem nearly impossible, let alone ascending to the lofty heights of streaming stardom, but according to Twitch veteran Summit1g, all it took back in 2013 to achieve the coveted success many aspire to was a few “right” choices.
Summit1g started live-streaming his gaming exploits in 2012 and has since established himself as one of the Twitch faces in the eyes of many, including xQc, who last week ranked the star at the top of his streamer tier list. However, for more recent viewers, Summit’s early Twitch streams that led to this point remain somewhat of a mystery.
That is, until he shared a glimpse of his stream’s beginnings yesterday during a stream.The topic of conversation came up when a viewer gave money to Summit and mentioned that they had been watching the streamer before “DayZ days.” This sparked a wave of nostalgia in the streamer, who then went on to describe how he came to be a Twitch legend.
Summit claims that in the early days of Twitch, he simply “did everything the right way,” which led to much of his success “falling into his lap.” The first wise move, according to Summit, was switching from Counter-Strike 1.6 to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which increased his viewership from 20 to 200.
The streamer then took a calculated risk by deciding to switch games once more, but this time away from Valve’s Counter-Strike franchise, which was responsible for his early success.
Fortunately for him, things improved quickly, and the Twitch star soon found himself back on the fast track to success with an average of 1,400 viewers. Summit theorizes that this occurred because War Z had a much higher “potential” than Counter-Strike.
But the increases in his audience didn’t end there. After a while, Summit changed his stream to a different game once more; this time, the ARMA 2 DayZ Mod; shortly after that, the standalone DayZ game. According to the streamer, these games “catapulted” Summit’s stream in a way similar to Mario Kart speed boosts.
Summit has since played a wide variety of games over the course of his ten-year streaming career, but it appears the star is happy to return to the game that made him one of the greatest on the platform, as DayZ has seen a significant increase in viewers on Twitch as a result of many of the top creators giving it another try.