A Big Corp's Advice
Once the whole fiasco with my little sister had blown over, I found myself trading messages with Jump, looking for advice on streaming.
Deciding to start a broadcast was one thing. Preparing for one was another. I didn't even know the basics, so help wasn't optional—it was essential. On top of that, there was a mountain of other information I still needed to learn.
At the very least, I had to understand a minimum viable setup. Mashing the Go Live button wouldn't cut it. If I wanted a stream that actually felt watchable, I needed to look into the settings too.
Which made my connection with Jump matter. Advice from a big-corp streamer with six hundred thousand subscribers wasn't something you stumbled into every day.
He had a point. I wasn't taking the job of streamer lightly.
As for how I'd ended up interested in streaming in the first place, the answer came without any real thought at all. It was that one line from my sister—asking when I was going to become an adult. And somewhere under that, I'd also started feeling like I needed an identity I could actually present if someone asked what I did. Tell people you were a NEET loafing around at home, and how were they supposed to look at you?
Of course, I didn't have anyone around who'd look at me that way. But you never know how the world works. Connections weren't something that only happened in real life, either.
More than anything, I liked that I could treat the thing I was most interested in right now—Last of Quantum—as an actual job.
The problem was how you got popular. There was even a saying that streamers lived and died by their popularity.
Even that, though, didn't seem worth losing sleep over.
Clack, clack. A search for "Unknown" on the Last of Quantum community turned up dozens of related posts without even trying. The view counts all sat comfortably in the tens of thousands, and plenty cleared the hundreds of thousands. Some were trending posts drawing feverish attention; others had gone up less than an hour ago. Proof that even after the hacking controversy had been put to bed, there were still people paying attention to me.
A lot of the titles were things like When is Unknown streaming? Clicking into one of them, I found something that could only be described as a rain dance. It wasn't even a figure of speech. They were holding an actual rain ritual.
I went through the comments one by one.
Looking at posts like that, I couldn't help thinking that if I was going to start streaming, now was the moment. In the end, the most important thing about a stream was whether people actually watched it. On that front, the fact that people were already waiting for mine counted as half the battle. At the very least, the rain-dancers would show up.
Actually hitting Go Live, though, was another matter.
If you stripped it down, my current popularity came from the concept of a woman who was good at the game. Female players were rare enough in Last of Quantum to be practically endangered. It was a unique concept, sure, but it wasn't as if no streamer had ever used it. In the end, if the stream was boring or failed to satisfy, the viewers would leave. Whether a newbie who'd only just started learning about broadcasting could pull that off was another question.
Everyone has a first time, and nobody's good at everything from the start. That's why connections always matter. There's no better opportunity than getting advice from a leader in the field before you even begin—and if that person happens to be good at the game too, even better.
A moment later, a call came in from Jump. I moved the mouse and picked up, and he offered an awkward greeting.
"Ah, hello."
"Hello."
"I'll start by walking you through the setup. Anything you're stuck on?"
"Yeah. The settings change depending on the hardware, so it's a mess. I also don't really get how to link it with the Connector."
That was how I remembered it from poking at the settings myself. The write-ups online had looked easy enough, but the second I tried to actually configure anything, it felt endlessly complicated.
"The donation settings especially. There's a bunch of them and I don't understand any of it."
Honestly, I just wanted to ask him to do the whole thing for me. The more I looked into streaming, the more it kept unfolding without end, and even thinking about searching a little further made my head hurt.
"You're asking for a lot, huh. Let me check a few things first. Do you use a two-PC setup, or are you planning to?"
I'd heard that professional streamers split a broadcast PC from a gaming PC. I had no intention of going that far. I didn't even know how this was going to turn out, so I couldn't sink that kind of investment into it—and I couldn't afford it anyway.
"No."
"Then what about the mic?"
"Can't I just use the one I have now?"
"That'd be fine, technically... Expensive gear doesn't magically pull viewers. But your case is a little different. Getting a decent mic wouldn't hurt."
I'd thought this would end with a few settings. Instead, the whole thing kept getting bigger.
"Got a recommendation?"
I had no interest in hunting down value picks one piece of hardware at a time. When was I supposed to check every option, buy it, and then set it all up?
"I'll send you a site. Streamers use it a lot when they're buying gear. Take a look around."
I opened the link Jump sent. Mics and other equipment were laid out in rows, starting at around seven dollars and climbing past seventy, then seven hundred and beyond.
"There's a lot of them."
"Just pick whatever you like. They're all at least decent. If you're still stuck, you can sort by most recommended and buy off that. That usually works out."
I switched to the recommended sort the way he'd said and looked through the mics one by one. There were tags to filter by price range, too, so finding something reasonable wasn't hard.
I went with one that had launched wrapped in the word "value." Once you crossed the seventy-dollar line, calling it a value pick was a stretch, but at least the performance would be trustworthy. Following Jump's advice to buy a mic and leave the expensive gear alone for now, I didn't even glance at anything else.
"You said no two-PC. Is it one monitor too?"
"Yeah. One monitor, one computer."
"Then the setup shouldn't be too bad. In Discord there's a screen share option, right? Turn that on and I'll walk you through it."
I turned on screen share the way Jump told me to. Watching my monitor feed go out as-is was oddly fascinating. In a way, wasn't this a kind of stream too? Even if the viewer count was sitting at one.
From there I moved as Jump directed, lining up the settings for a broadcast. I got advice on everything from the most basic video output to donation setup to hotkeys that would make streaming easier.
"That's the basic setup done. Now we need to link the Connector... What model is it?"
"I just bought the cheapest one."
"Ah, if it's the cheapest... wait. You bought it?"
Needing a Connector to log into Last of Quantum was common sense, wasn't it? They didn't fall out of the sky. Of course you had to buy one. I couldn't understand why he was so shocked.
"Yeah, I bought it."
"Uh... you bought that expensive thing...? Is your family loaded? Wait—then why are you even trying to stream? Is this like a hobby?"
"You need a Connector to log in. You're supposed to buy one, aren't you?"
"Ah..."
Jump let out a short breath, like he'd finally understood. Then, without another word, he sent me a site.
I clicked through, full of questions—and the second the page loaded, I understood exactly why he'd reacted like that.
"Connectors are so expensive that most people rent them on a subscription like this... It's way cheaper than buying, so that's what people usually do... Me included."
The site let you rent all kinds of Connectors at relatively low prices. The latest models still ran a hefty seven hundred and fifty dollars, but the model I'd bought could be rented for a mere hundred and fifty.
Put simply, I had paid upfront—in one lump sum—an amount that could have covered at least forty months of rental.
Like an idiot.