Relying on Twitch streaming for income is a hard life. Anyone who doesn't realize this is delusional.
You're talking 10-12 hours _every day_ entertaining people. Successful streamers work 6-7 day weeks at those hours and if they're lucky take 2 weeks off a year -- one of those spent at TwitchCon. Most of them are playing the same game for long stretches of time (months to years). That's really hard!
And if you regularly have ~3k viewers, you'll probably earn $2k-4k a month between ad money and donations. Except for outliers, obviously. The overwhelming majority of streamers are not successful, by the way, or are only successful for a year or two.
It's absolutely a labor of love. You do it because you can't stand doing the alternative.
The catch is that if a story like this is interesting enough to be printed, it's usually also too unusual to actually be representative. No one's going to read "guy quits his job to go to law school".
I think the concept of (optional) subscriptions funding Twitch streamers is an excellent replacement for ads however if you are considering making a living off Twitch you should be aware of the politics. There is a culture of banning streamers (sometimes indefinitely, but rarely upon first ban) for violations in their extremely vauge TOS. Usually no reason is given and there are major inconsistencies between some streamers' moderation and others.
You're talking 10-12 hours _every day_ entertaining people. Successful streamers work 6-7 day weeks at those hours and if they're lucky take 2 weeks off a year -- one of those spent at TwitchCon. Most of them are playing the same game for long stretches of time (months to years). That's really hard!
And if you regularly have ~3k viewers, you'll probably earn $2k-4k a month between ad money and donations. Except for outliers, obviously. The overwhelming majority of streamers are not successful, by the way, or are only successful for a year or two.
It's absolutely a labor of love. You do it because you can't stand doing the alternative.