Might as Well Go for the King
Streamers are a tribe hypersensitive to trends.
Unless their weight class is already sky-high and a concrete fanbase has been stacked rock-solid beneath them, they have to be even more sensitive. Only then can they scrape together a little extra traffic and shore up the foundation of their channel.
Any broadcaster who fails to stay trendy gets weeded out; give it enough time and you simply cannot find them anymore. The streamers who survive, therefore, are almost all the sort who know how to read the current.
What does “reading the current” actually mean? It means knowing which memes are hot right now, which videos are blowing up on Vtube, and which kinds of content make live viewers pile in. It is all of a piece with that.
Knowing the release schedule of a new game that is getting good word among gamers and immediately streaming it is one of those skills.
Whenever a solid new title drops, it is common to see most of the streamers parked at the top of Twish all playing the exact same game.
This time was no different. Eternal, the highly anticipated title among gamers, had been out for a mere ten hours.
Only ten hours—and yet the majority of Twish’s broadcast categories were already pointing at Eternal. Truly befitting the holy land of variety gaming, where every kind of game gets played without discrimination.
Lately even that holy land had started leaning hard toward only a handful of specific titles like Abyss, but whenever a game that smelled like a genuine god-tier title appeared, everyone still threw themselves into it with one heart and one mind. After all, they were all people who made games their livelihood.
And sitting at the absolute top of Twish was one particular broadcast. Needless to say, it too was playing Eternal.
Coldly speaking, the category itself was as stale as it got. With streamers everywhere streaming Eternal, category scarcity simply did not exist.
To put it bluntly, other broadcasts were playing the same game; there was no particular reason anyone had to watch this one.
So why did the stream currently parked at the very top of Twish have so many viewers? It was just another common Eternal playthrough.
That could be explained by two big reasons. Either the streamer’s fanbase was so thick that people would watch no matter what game was on, or the broadcast itself was interesting enough to pull in far more floating traffic than the others.
The stream of Kayak, currently sitting at the top of Twish, satisfied both reasons at once.
She already had a considerable concrete layer of regulars, and there was a kind of magic that made the curious newcomers who dropped in thinking “what’s this room even doing?” stick around and keep watching.
Looking at the overall play, she was a textbook newbie—yet somehow the things she did did not feel ordinary for a newbie. It made you keep watching with the thought, who the hell is this person?
If you had to sum up the feelings of the viewers watching the stream in a single phrase, it would be: “a broadcast you literally cannot take your eyes off.”
Kayak really did keep playing exactly however she felt like playing.
When she wanted to run, she ran. When she wanted to walk, she walked.
If a building appeared in front of her she went inside first and asked questions later; whatever items were inside, she stuffed them into her bag first and asked questions later.
That was why her looting speed was inevitably fast. Kayak was the type who crammed items into her backpack and only later decided whether she actually needed them.
She simply did not know which items were good or bad in the first place.
She would keep jamming things in until the bag was full, only then skim the item descriptions roughly, and toss whatever looked unnecessary. The resulting playstyle left frustrated viewers spamming backseat advice.
Kayak paid it no mind. Her earlier claim that she would just enjoy the first game lightly had not been empty words; she was busy trying all sorts of different things.
Scooping up nothing but flints and building a campfire right in the middle of an open field, or following every high-tier dagger recipe listed in the guide, and so on.
These were not actions normal players would take. Most people moved busily with victory as their goal.
The main playstyles were either focusing hard on looting to power up, or hunting other players to raise proficiency at a steep curve.
Kayak, on the other hand, treated the path she walked as the path itself—a pure my-way style that ignored every other factor. That very quality worked as charm and was why so many viewers had piled in.
Of course, the key point was that even while doing all that, she never skipped the things that actually needed to be done.
She moved to new zones in time with the shrinking safe area, took down the neutral monsters that appeared now and then, and handled sudden enemy ambushes with practiced ease.
From a pure gameplay standpoint there was nothing to criticize. She grew steadily and before long had entered the list of strong contenders for the win inside the match—which was exactly why even the viewers who had been backseating her nonstop suddenly had nothing left to say.
It was also why some of them felt she played like a veteran. She kept doing weird, fun-first plays and yet somehow still performed well, so the thought kept rising: is this person really a newbie?
And so, despite the countless sniper squads trying to grief her, Kayak pulled off the feat of finishing inside the final top ten survivors on her very first game.
“Ah, that’s a shame. I had no idea terrain like that even existed.”
Eternal, experienced for the first time, was a pretty fun game.
People dropping randomly across a vast map, a shrinking playable zone, class-specific skills, and monsters scattered all over the map—despite being a beta rather than a full official release, the polish was considerable.
It was enough to make you think, so that’s why everyone was making such a fuss.
Unlike other survival games, the extra systems they had packed in were also appealing. The fact that there were growth elements you could pursue inside a match, and the wide variety of interactions possible all over the map, both felt genuinely novel.
Gather flints, build a campfire, and cook right there. Eternal was not a simple survival game after all.
Eternal had the makings of an excellent god-tier title—one that could be fun both for the person playing and for the people watching.
Once the game fully released, I figured streamers who mainly streamed Eternal the way people streamed Abyss would start appearing. The birth of Eternal specialists. The game itself was just that interesting.
Even I, having just finished one match, already felt the desire to take first place quietly rising.
Honestly, if it had been boring I would have just done one game and turned it off, but this was something I simply could not leave alone.
“Shall we play a few more? Now that I roughly know how it works. First-place queue-king… yeah, let’s do first-place queue-king.”
“…Queue’s popping pretty fast.”
After Kayak’s queue-king declaration the matchmaking locked in within a single second and the overall level of the lobby suddenly spiked, but nothing particularly unexpected happened.
Kayak played a total of four more games after that, took the win on the fourth, and ended the stream right there.