Minor Streamer
There were countless jobs in this world.
From ordinary office workers to professionals like lawyers and accountants, people lived out their lives through a single occupation.
And then there was this man who had chosen to work from home. A reckless idiot who had started broadcasting for fun, thought it seemed decent enough, and then decided on a career with no further thought at all.
A one-year veteran minor streamer with no camera.
That was me.
“No, please!”
“You insane bastards!! Why are you going in there with no vision?!”
Every time I slammed my fist down, one of the keys stuck into the keyboard would pop loose and fly in all directions.
I really felt like I was losing my mind. If you lost a game you’d had in the bag because a dealer threw by playing carelessly, anyone would react the same way.
“No, seriously, is it right for the marksman to walk into an area with no vision from there?”
“He’s Silver? That bastard is in Silver? Wow, the game must really be ruined...”
I let out a long sigh while straightening the keyboard, whose keycaps were missing here and there. For some reason, my team luck was especially terrible today.
Not just the marksman from earlier, but the support too, the top laner from the game before that, the jungler from the one before that. Out of every match I’d played today, not a single game had featured all five players doing anything remotely sensible.
Seriously, how was this possible? Was the game company rigging matchmaking against me alone?
“No, for real, what is with my team luck? Is this matchmaking rigging or what?”
“You’re banned. Good luck.”
Tra-la-la~ tra-la-la~ dum-ka-dak dum-ka-dak
I put the chat window that was visible to me on the broadcast screen while humming a tune that sounded like the sort of BGM you’d hear if you flipped over a set of hanafuda cards and found a sakura blossom on the other side.
The chat was filled with people mourning the message that had just been aimed at me. Rising above that, I found a single question mark.
It was a user with the nickname ShariLong. Looking through their chat history, they were just a viewer who had been watching my broadcast in a perfectly ordinary way for a long time.
If I said sorry, would I let them off this once? I moved the mouse over the permanent ban button and said,
“Defendant. Make your final statement.”
“I’m sorry. Please spare me.”
“Please spare me?”
Your last words before death are just “please spare me”? Are you kidding me?
“That’s all your last words amount to?”
“You want one more chance? As if I’d give you one?”
I said that, but they had still been watching my broadcast for a long time. It wasn’t as if they had been especially rude before, either.
From the start, I had no intention of handing out a permanent ban. Instead of a permanent suspension, I clicked chat restriction and set it to ten minutes.
“A ban feels a little too harsh even to me, so go over there, spend ten minutes in the hall of repentance, and come back after you’ve reflected on your sins.”
Click. I clicked the mouse without mercy. For the next ten minutes, this person would not be able to chat. But as someone who had once been unemployed, I knew better than anyone that not being able to chat for ten minutes would be even more painful for them.
“How many streamers are there who never use permanent bans? This much should make me an angel, right? Thank you to the person who typed that. I’ll give you a gifted subscription.”
“What alt account? What employee? If I had money for that, I’d buy new broadcasting gear.”
And with that kind of useless banter, I started queueing up for another game.
A game streamer with a little over a hundred viewers. Not exactly tiny enough to call a true minor streamer, but since about six or seven months after I started broadcasting, the number of viewers had stopped rising and stopped falling, just sitting there.
I didn’t really know why. For one thing, I needed some kind of hook to pull people in, and then I needed to show off my appeal as a broadcaster if I wanted more viewers to stick around. The problem was that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do to make that happen.
Talk first, game second. That was me. I had even thought about trying a game I wasn’t familiar with instead of the one I always played.
Since the idea had come up, maybe I should try it now.
“Team luck’s awful today anyway, so let’s try a game that’s trending right now.”
“Is Battle Sky fun? It’s been a huge hit lately.”
Battle Sky, newly released this time by a Korean game company, was a battle royale game where up to one hundred players in a single match survived by evading an ever-shrinking zone until only one remained. Unlike the FPS games most Koreans were used to, you entered the game empty-handed, looted guns and other equipment, and competed against other people. Just hearing that, it was definitely a pretty fresh style of game.
“I’ve never played an FPS before. Should I use this chance to get into one?”
“Hold on, let me change the stream title...”
“Welcome, newcomers. I hope you have fun while you’re here.”
As soon as I changed the title and game list, more and more viewers started trickling in. Since it really was a game that had taken the world by storm, it definitely seemed to be affecting viewer traffic.
After downloading the game, I launched it and went through the tutorial. But the screen felt a little choppy somehow. I checked the frame rate and found that while it was fine most of the time, the moment I threw a throwable, the frames suddenly dropped hard.
I’d once heard in passing that FPS games lived and died by frame rate. When I went into the options to adjust the graphics settings, a mountain of custom settings was waiting for me. Ugh, dizzy already.
“Isn’t there some kind of standard setting for this?”
“So you’re saying I should set anti-aliasing, texture, and distance to ultra, and turn everything else down to the lowest setting?”
I set the options as the viewers had told me to and clicked confirm. After closing the settings and returning to the game screen, something about it felt strangely different to my eyes. The graphics were kind of awkward.
“It feels a little off. Maybe that’s because the previous settings were on absolute max?”
“Ah, right. It felt weird because there were no shadows.”
I spun the mouse and took aim while checking the frame rate. It definitely felt much smoother than before. Looking again, even when I threw a throwable, it felt far better than before.
“Can I start the game like this?”
The character’s clothes could be put on for free in all sorts of combinations. I dressed them up in whatever looked decent and started the match.
After a short loading screen, I arrived at a place crowded with people and had to wait one minute.
Starting like this was a little boring, though...
“It feels kind of dull to just sit here. I heard Watch added a point betting feature this time, so should we try that?”
“All right, number 1 is chicken, number 2 is failure. We’ll do it for exactly one minute.”
But that bet never got used.
“Hey, I haven’t even touched the ground yet, you insane bastards!!!”
Before I’d even gotten a chance to land, some bastard who had dropped first shot me dead...
That’s outright newbie persecution, you idiots!
They’re killing all the newbies!