“Stream Big” looks at the challenges of making it as a Twitch streamer
“Stream Big” looks at the challenges of making it as a Twitch streamer
The last few years have been rocky for the live-streaming platform Twitch. Despite enjoying an uptick in viewership during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, a report from The Wall Street Journal last year suggested the company has yet to turn a profit for Amazon, which purchased Twitch in 2014.
Yet Twitch remains a big deal for the millions of people who stream on it, which the website TwitchTracker estimates at over 7 million users last month. Making it as a streamer can be exceedingly difficult; an analysis of a 2021 data leak of creator payouts suggested that fewer than 1% of streamers actually make minimum wage.
“Being there every day, streaming during the same time segment, there’s always the thought of, ‘If I stop or if I take a sustained break, then everyone will leave,'” said journalist Nathan Grayson, co-founder of the website Aftermath. “They’ll find somebody else to either follow or watch or, crucially, give their money to.”
In his new book, “Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen,” Grayson chronicles both the platform and the streamers who made it what it is today. The following is an excerpt looking at the experience of one streamer who attempted to capitalize on a moment of virality.
Breaking points are strange. Sometimes they take months or years of reflection, meditation, therapy. But other breaking points happen instantly, with the viciousness of a thunderclap. Emme “Negaoryx” Montgomery learned this the hard way.
On the wings of a viral moment in 2019, Montgomery’s star had finally begun to rise. To pursue her dreams of Twitch fame — or even just a middle of-the-road Twitch career — she’d given up a college education and a career in the entertainment industry. She’d endured countless long days and sleepless nights to get her numbers up.
All of that — years of unglamorous toil — built to a single, thirteen-second stream moment. In it, Montgomery, light brown hair swooped to the side and clad in a plain white tank top, playing the popular PlayStation action-horror game The Last of Us, gets taken by surprise when an arrow impales an innocent rabbit, splattering virtual snow with disarmingly realistic bunny blood. Already in a heightened state of emotion from a previous story scene in the game, Montgomery immediately covers her face with her hands and yelps in authentic sorrow. That’s it. That’s the entire clip.
Much like her dearly departed lagomorphic friend, Montgomery never could have predicted what happened next. Nobody could’ve. The internet builds its ever-evolving zeitgeist like a free-form jazz player: It selects pieces in an almost gleefully haphazard fashion, and somehow they fall into place without bringing the whole house down. In 2019, it was suddenly Montgomery’s turn to be at the center of it all. Her thirteen-second livestream moment had everything: tragedy, comedy, and spontaneity that simply couldn’t be scripted. Millions of people shared hundreds of versions of the “Last of Us dying rabbit meme girl” clip. Literally overnight, she went from having a regular Twitch viewership of a couple hundred to thousands, all waiting expectantly to meet the woman behind the meme.
Montgomery could not let this moment go to waste. She knew what was at stake. On Twitch, chances to “make it” are few, far between, and most importantly, fleeting. There are around 7 million streamers on the platform. After analyzing data from a 2021 leak that revealed payment information for everybody on Twitch, observers found that fewer than ten thousand — less than 0.1 percent — of streamers make minimum wage or better, let alone get rich. And things were likely better by then, compared to the timing of Montgomery’s big moment in 2019. But it’s always been a mighty exclusive club, and one that features a revolving door; back in 2018, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, then Twitch’s most popular streamer, took a two-day break from streaming. He lost forty thousand paying subscribers, totaling out to over $100,000. Much like livestreaming as a medium, even success on Twitch is ephemeral. For every Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassell — every pillar of consistency who has managed to stick it out for over a decade — there are countless big names and no names who’ve burnt out and fallen off almost overnight. This weighed on Montgomery, just as it weighs on every person who hopes to turn the pipe dream of playing video games for a living into a career.
“I just said ‘yes’ to everything because I thought I was never gonna get opportunities again,” Montgomery explained.
So, in the first half of 2019, she streamed and participated in events as much as humanly possible. During one event, a live charity drive for Red Nose Day, a campaign to end child poverty, she rubbed elbows with megastars like fellow streamers Imane “Pokimane” Anys and Rachell “Valkyrae” Hofstetter as well as movie star (who moonlights as a YouTuber) Jack Black. But she also picked up a cough she just couldn’t shake. Fortunately, she wasn’t sick. Her voice was just struggling after endless amounts of talking on-stream and off. But then, midway through the event, one of her coughs hit different.
“I coughed and felt something in my side,” Montgomery said. “I tried to inhale and wanted to scream. It was like somebody shoving the world’s sharpest sword directly inside me anytime I tried to breathe. I was like, ‘I’m on camera. We’re smiling and at a charity event, and I’m fucking dying. What is happening to me?’”
Montgomery had coughed so hard that she broke a rib. But she couldn’t stop. By this point it was the beginning of summer, and she had too many events on the calendar. Famous streamers were just about to host a reality TV−style broadcast called Streamer Camp, and she’d been invited to compete. It was an enormous opportunity to grow her audience and network with some of the biggest names in the business. How could she say no? On top of that, E3, an LA-based convention that functions as the nexus of all video game announcements, was set to take place immediately after in June, and Montgomery had landed a hosting gig. She couldn’t pass that up, either. So she decided to soldier on, broken rib and all. She’d just smile her way through the pain, she figured. She’d already done it once, after all. How hard could it be to keep doing it . . . indefinitely?
Then, while Montgomery was sitting on a couch and catching up with some friends, that nasty cough decided to rattle her rib cage again. Cough, cough, pop. Just like that, she’d broken another rib. The pain was so intense that her friends had to carry her to bed. The next day, a doctor told her there was really only one thing she could do to expedite her recovery: rest for a couple weeks. He asked her if she could take that much time off work. She said she could but she wasn’t going to.
“He literally laughed in my face and said, ‘Good luck,’” Montgomery recalled.
The day after, she was off to a premiere of the movie X-Men: Dark Phoenix for a stream sponsored by Fox. Mere hours after that event wrapped, she took a Lyft to the house in LA where Streamer Camp was being filmed and spent a week hardly sleeping and competing in livestreamed challenges alongside other streamers. She ended up leaving before everyone else, not because she had two broken ribs, which had not, you will be surprised to learn, miraculously healed, but because it was time to rush over to the LA Convention Center for the days-long, appointment-packed frenzy that is E3. Even once that ended, there was no finish line in sight. Next, Montgomery flew out to a charity summit in Memphis, Tennessee, and then to an event hosted by one of gaming’s biggest publishers, EA, in Germany, followed shortly by TwitchCon—an official Twitch convention—in Europe.
“All of my viewers were like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Take care of yourself,’” Montgomery said. “I probably sounded like a crazy person to everyone, because I was like, ‘I can’t stop.’”
In the end, the physical toll was great. Montgomery said her body — already prone to pain from a spinal injury — remained “messed up” long after. But the mental toll was greater. There’s a price when you push yourself past your breaking point. You can only put so many cracks in your resolve before its foundation starts to crumble. Going into her nonstop summer, Montgomery was already in rough shape. Just before the Last of Us bunny kicked off a new chapter in her Twitch career, her stepfather had lost his battle with cancer.
Excerpted from “Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen” by Nathan Grayson. Copyright 2025 © by Nathan Grayson. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster LLC.
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