To sponsors, Twitch offers a novel opportunity: access to a generation that resists traditional advertising media but is steeped in video games. “Everyone was, like, ‘Where’d he go? Is he dead from the donation?’ ” “I had to shut my mike off and walk away,” he said. One sent him fifteen hundred dollars-a gift that reduced Garcia to tears. During a stream, he asked viewers to help him hang on a little longer. (“I was so bad, I got kicked out of the dare program,” he told me.) After a year of broadcasting, he had a steady audience of seven hundred, but he was still desperately broke. While he isn’t its best player, he has a knack for talking entertainingly over his play: he is funny, brash, and filled with stories about his delinquent childhood in Newark. Garcia’s specialty is the multiplayer fantasy game World of Warcraft. His weight grew to four hundred and twenty pounds. His ankles swelled from sitting at his computer. “That’s what I had to do to grow the viewership,” he said. The only way to attract viewers, and to prevent the ones you had from straying to other broadcasters, was to be online constantly, so he routinely streamed for eighteen hours a day. Game streaming, Garcia discovered, required non-stop work. “Imagine telling your girlfriend, ‘I’m going to stop looking for a job and play video games for a living,’ ” he told me. Still, Garcia thought that he could make it work, so he sat Aracely down to convince her. Game broadcasting was new, and the business model all but nonexistent. When Garcia started streaming, in 2010, he’d recently been laid off from a quality-assurance job at a pharmaceutical-software company he and Aracely scraped by on unemployment checks and her wages from Costco. Garcia led us up to the casino’s Presidential Suite, where his girlfriend, Aracely, was waiting at the bar. “I just watched my girlfriend lose nine hundred dollars in about three minutes,” he announced cheerfully. Yet when Garcia appeared-bearded, stout, and wearing aviator sunglasses-he was convivial but composed. “That’s probably not a good sign of sobriety,” he said. He glanced at his phone, and then showed me an eclectically punctuated text from Garcia. Though Dariani is chummy and non-judgmental with clients, he’s seen enough drunk streamers fall off balconies at industry parties to inspire an almost parental anxiety. He strode inside, eyes scanning the acres of slot machines. Shortly before noon, Dariani pulled up in front of the Viejas Casino & Resort and handed his keys to a valet. With viewership numbers that rival those of MSNBC or CNN, Twitch is less like a conventional Web site than like a kaleidoscopic television network: thousands of channels at once, broadcasting live at every hour of the day. This audience is large enough to make the site one of the twenty most trafficked in the U.S., yet it’s perhaps more apt to measure Twitch against a different medium. Each month, a hundred million visitors watch their favorite personalities play video games on Twitch, spending an average of nearly two hours a day there. Garcia, known online as Towelliee, is a star broadcaster on Twitch, a streaming platform whose popularity has turned recreational gaming into an improbably viable career. “We just need to get there before he starts to drink,” he said. Dariani’s speedometer crept toward ninety miles per hour. That day, he was on his way to meet the streamer Roberto Garcia, who was supposed to be at home but had instead gone to a casino outside the city to celebrate his girlfriend’s birthday. He is thirty-eight, with a dry, ironic wit and a nervous habit of twirling his goatee, which is rapidly going gray his clients are, for the most part, young, boisterous, and unpredictable. of Online Performers Group, a talent-management company dedicated to professional video-game streamers, who broadcast their game play and commentary live over the Internet. One humid morning this past summer, Omeed Dariani drove his black Tesla sedan through the foothills east of San Diego, looking apprehensive. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.
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