A Successful First Broadcast, Part 2
Seo Yunju, assistant manager on the Contents Planning & Operations Team.
Her discovery of Yeongho’s broadcast was, of course, no accident.
“Huh? This is a channel I’ve never seen before.”
In charge of the Live Management part within the planning and operations team, Assistant Manager Seo was doing what she always did: browsing the platform’s broadcasts as part of her daily routine.
She looked into what kind of content streamers were running, tracked audience trends and donation responses, and recorded the results.
For the planning and operations team, whose job included keeping up with the latest trends and developing new content ideas, checking broadcasts often was simply one of those tasks that had to be done.
He’s just a regular streamer. And today’s his first broadcast, too?
In principle, any streamer averaging four-digit viewership was already under the Live Management team’s watch.
Since viewer count was directly tied to revenue, there was no way the management team could miss a streamer who’d made even a little name for himself.
That was why it was extremely rare for a broadcast the staff hadn’t even noticed to suddenly swing by the thousands in such a short span of time.
“There’s no way viewer numbers could spike like this out of nowhere...”
If a famous streamer hadn’t even gone live, the platform’s monitoring system would normally flag that kind of change automatically.
Seo muttered to herself out of habit, kept the stream open, and clicked through a few screens to check the related database.
After digging through the information with practiced ease, she quickly found the cause.
Lots of duplicate views... Ah, they’re coming over from Choi Pinam’s stream. A push for a rookie? Maybe a friend who just started streaming?
Choi Pinam was a partner streamer at the upper ranks of the platform, and Seo knew him well.
Streamer status was broadly divided into three tiers.
First came regular streamers.
That was the baseline for streamers who hadn’t yet found any real traction and didn’t have special monetization opportunities.
Anyone could start broadcasting, without restriction, but the proportion of streamers who rose beyond the regular tier wasn’t very high.
Next came partner streamers.
This tier was granted when a streamer who had reached a certain level of viewers and followers joined the platform’s affiliate program.
From that point on, the streamer entered into a formal contractual relationship with the company.
New income opportunities were added, such as subscription features and ad revenue sharing.
Finally came partner-tier streamers.
This was the company’s official highest rank, reserved for streamers who drew major popularity and could maintain a stable audience, subject to internal review and approval.
They were guaranteed a high revenue split, along with a variety of promotional opportunities and priority technical support.
Even now, when personal streaming had become more visible and the number of streamers on the platform had surpassed ten thousand,
there were still only about two hundred people under contract—an actual equal partnership in which the platform poured every possible benefit into them.
If this is a stream Choi Pinam is backing... I need to keep an eye on it.
Among partner streamers, Choi Pinam was an especially popular broadcaster in the top five percent.
And if you considered that partner-tier streamers, the highest rank, were assigned entire dedicated teams...
then, in practical terms, he was one of the streamers the Live Management team had to pay the most attention to.
This rookie, SJ DAD, looked like someone Choi Pinam was seriously pushing. As a member of the management team, Seo needed to know what kind of person he was.
“Eh, wha—?”
But the broadcast she’d been watching as an extension of her work...
soon had enough in it to make her forget her duty and become nothing more than one viewer among many.
What is this person? Is something like this... even possible?
Someone who worked in Live Management and browsed hundreds of streams every day was not likely to lack an eye for talent.
To Seo, the display that streamer was putting on was so unbelievable it could only be described as unreal.
“Plat 1!?”
“Yunju? Is something wrong?”
“Ah, no, it’s nothing.”
When he finished the Battle Island placement matches and checked his rank tier, she shouted before she could stop herself, so shocked she’d practically leapt out of her seat.
She didn’t especially like games, but because of work she knew enough about them to follow what was going on.
She also knew how hard it was to hit Platinum in placements, since the company’s streamers had once made a whole challenge craze out of placement matches.
This person is going to blow up.
That was conclusion enough from just a brief look.
She had joined the company at twenty and become an assistant manager in only three years, and even within the department she was already known as an ace.
Four years had passed since her promotion, and now she was twenty-seven.
While her high school classmates, after graduating from college and entering the workforce, were still ordinary employees or just barely reaching the point of promotion eligibility, Seo was burning the midnight oil and racking up achievements with a ferocious focus, aiming for section manager within the next year or two.
At this rate, he’ll grow enough to sign a partner contract before long. If I handle him now, it’ll count as a solid achievement.
For Seo Yunju, who had just as much ambition as talent, this was like discovering a polished gem, not just a rough stone.
All she had to do was pick it up, brush off the dust, and package it properly, and it would become a source of huge profit.
And the justification was already decent.
Account suspension? Yeah, from another player’s perspective in-game, this really would look like a bug abuser. Still, twice in a row... of course he’d be upset.
Ppajijik was a large broadcasting platform in its own right, but at the same time it was also a subsidiary backed by one of the conglomerates that hovered around the top twenty in Korea’s business rankings.
Even if it didn’t have any direct ties to most game companies, it was still in a position where it could easily send a direct message asking them to resolve the issue promptly because a problem had occurred while a customer was using their service.
Of course, as only an assistant manager, she couldn’t step into the spotlight on her own; at minimum, she’d need to borrow the name of the team lead.
But since she was trusted a great deal by her superiors, testing the waters like that wouldn’t be difficult.
If she handled this issue and left her name behind, it would surely become a stepping-stone toward a good long-term relationship.
It was true that, until now, no one from the company had ever stepped in first to take care of a streamer who hadn’t even reached affiliate status yet.
But since he seemed to have the potential to become a major streamer in a short time, if she didn’t plant her flag now, the chance to claim the achievement might disappear altogether.
Having made up her mind, Seo immediately placed a call to the contact number the streamer had registered when joining the platform.
“Hyeong-nim! I actually know someone who’s a partner streamer here. That brother has a direct line to the staff on the platform, so I already asked him to help us out!”
“Oh, really?”
“Still, wouldn’t it carry more weight for a company to contact another company than for a private individual to leave a post with customer support? That way, the Battle Arena game company should take your account seriously too and make sure something like this false ban doesn’t happen again, Hyeong-nim.”
“That makes sense. Though honestly, you really didn’t have to go that far...”
After finishing the call, Choi Pinam came up with the air of a man who had done something impressive and launched into his explanation, while Yeongho gave an awkward smile and told him about the call from a moment ago.
“Ehh? They contacted you first? Wow... I’d heard companies monitored broadcasts, but to step in this quickly as soon as there’s a problem... Hyeong-nim, maybe you’re about to become a huge star. And you haven’t even applied for affiliate yet. That’s wild.”
“A huge star? Haha... Choi Pinam, you really do use words that sound a bit old for your age.”
“...That doesn’t sound like a compliment somehow. Besides, people always tease me for looking old already.”
“Looking old... well, um... Ah, anyway, they said they’d handle it, so we don’t need to worry. Let’s just finish the rest of the schedule and go home.”
“Hyeong-nim? If you dodge the point like that, it only makes me sadder.”
The two of them, who had been talking back and forth about the account suspension for a bit, soon shifted to a more serious discussion about the day’s stream.
After finishing a broadcast, going over the day’s run and giving feedback—even if only briefly—was an important part of the closing routine that a pro streamer couldn’t afford to neglect.
If possible, it was best to exchange opinions both ways, but since Yeongho was still a beginner streamer, the process was less like a discussion and more like a lecture from Choi Pinam, as they replayed the key moments and spent about thirty minutes going over them.
“Oh—looks like they already processed it.”
In the middle of that, a text message came in. When he checked it, it said the issue had been resolved and they had secured a promise that it wouldn’t happen again.
It even added that if anything like this happened in the future, he should ask for help again, and requested that he save the sender’s contact information.
It felt oddly careful, almost as if they were making a point of treating him well.
Since it happened on the first day of his stream, Yeongho didn’t clearly grasp that this was a highly unusual situation—but even so, he understood that much.
“Wow! That’s a big company for you, huh? Fast work. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have needed to ask for help separately—I caused extra trouble for nothing.”
“The platform seems to take very good care of its streamers. And the big company is technically the parent company, not the main headquarters.”
“Huh? Sure, they probably do care, but I’ve never heard of them doing something like this before... But a subsidiary is still a big company, right?”
At Choi Pinam’s innocent question—one that could only come from someone who’d never worked a corporate job—Yeongho felt the breath catch in his chest at the sheer cluelessness of it, then let out a snort of laughter.
When he’d worked at a dogshit company, he had to be careful with his words both inside and outside the office, so he’d always been careful to distinguish between subsidiaries, affiliates, and related companies.
He’d learned that saying they were all basically the same could get you dragged through the mud if it came out in the wrong place, and cause an enormous mess.
What kind of pride do people at a big company think they have?
At a dogshit company, being looked down on by clients was part of everyday life, and if your words got passed along incorrectly to a partner company, you had to pray it would end with nothing worse than a written apology.
But whether it was the parent company or a subsidiary, what did that matter to someone who made his living on personal streaming?
He just had to stream well.
“You’re right. Parent company or subsidiary, they’re all the same bastard in the end. Haha!”
“Right? Hahahaha—!”
He wasn’t sure why they were laughing, but Choi Pinam laughed along because Yeongho laughed, so there they were.
After sharing a cheerful burst of laughter for a while, the two of them felt the workday drawing to a close and began preparing to leave.
“Then I’ll head out first.”
“Yes, Hyeong-nim! Oh, right—I think you can keep streaming Battle Arena only through this week.”
“Hm? Weren’t we originally planning for about two weeks?”
“We were, but Hyeong-nim already got to the edge of Diamond with your placements. At this rate, won’t you blow past Diamond and hit Crown in like three or four days?”
There was the familiar tier ladder from Bronze all the way up to Diamond.
After that came the so-called heavenly realm, the Crown tier.
It was the final wall you could climb if you had decent talent along with luck and effort.
Above Crown was Ace, where only the true elite of the elite gathered.
And at the very top was a special tier called Predator, or Predator, reserved only for the top five hundred players on the rank board.
“Diamond is basically a given now, and I figure by tomorrow there’ll probably already be plenty of people setting Crown achievement bounties.”
“Once you reach Crown, we were planning to move on to that Legend of War game, right?”
“Yep. I expected that to take at least two weeks, but at this rate I think even one week might be enough.”
It was common for a scheduled plan to change depending on circumstances.
The reason was understandable, so Yeongho nodded and accepted it.
“Of course, Hyeong-nim, I think you could probably push past Crown and go all the way to Ace or even Predator. But unless you’re planning to become a Battle Arena specialist streamer, I also wonder if there’s any need to.”
“I understand. Still, I should probably decide how much longer to keep playing Battle Arena after seeing how the viewers react, right?”
“Yep! The move to LoW is only a tentative schedule anyway. If the bounty for Ace or Predator is set high enough, it’d be a shame to ignore it, so we’ll have to see.”
“All right. Then I’ll head out.”
“Yessir—have a safe trip home!”
After finishing the conversation, Yeongho left the studio and looked around.
It was a little after eight.
Several office workers with tired faces were walking past him.
Not long ago, he had been in the same position as them.
Now, even if he was just as tired, the work itself was strangely enjoyable, and even on his first day, the income was more than satisfying.
Working together with someone he’d met by good fortune felt fun, and when he looked at people’s reactions, a self-esteem he’d never had before kept swelling in his chest.
So much time spent worrying about reaching this point suddenly seemed foolish, because the job of streamer was giving him a happiness he had never expected.
“Maybe I should buy chicken for the kids on the way home.”
Even while leaning on his crutch, he walked with far more energy than the people around him.
For the first time in his life, Yeongho hummed on his commute home, stepping briskly toward the taxi stand.