After a little over a month of (and seemingly healthy) break from social media and content creation, Twitch star Imane “Pokimane” Anys is back to uploading. But things will be different now. Pokimane has dropped a new YouTube videos today details her Internet time away, talks about what she’s learned and what viewers can expect from her in the future. Overall, it serves to illustrate how Twitch’s second-biggest female broadcaster discovered the streaming business later this year.
Pokimane has become a household name on Twitch, the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform. With 9.2 million followers there, Pokimane is second only to Amouranth. However, she has been playing the game herself for almost a decade now, starting when she was just 17 years old. She turned her streaming hobby into a full-time job around the age of 21, appearing on videos at least six times a week, many hours at a time. That can be exhausting, especially if you’ve been doing it for almost 10 years, that’s how Pokimane feels.
So back in July – and this is the occasional routine for her – she gave up any form of racial connection to focus on herself. She didn’t specify exactly how long she’ll be offline, but after more than a month of absence, Pokimane came back and said that, in short, she won’t be keeping her previously suggested streaming schedule. about four times a week. Instead, she tells her audience she’ll “see you when I see you,” which she estimates is about two to three times a week, if so. And when viewers see her, it may not even necessarily be on Twitch.
Pokimane said she wasn’t aware of the extent of neglecting her own needs when streaming full-time, such as finding nearby grocery stores or establishing good habits. In other words, the “human basics” benefited the live stream, and the work, as she sees it, affected her ability to take care of herself. These are symptoms of the type of burnout that, over the years, many professional streamers have referred to as the general struggles that come with work. In Pokimane’s case, it spurred her to make a bigger, more permanent change. As she describes it, the problem is that sticking to her usual mode of work is like staying in a form of captive development.
“And obviously as humans, we just need to rinse and repeat what people like,” she said, referring to the willingness of trending content creators to hit the ground running. She argues that public play is corrosive when you’re young and still figuring out who you want to be. “I feel, especially as content creators, whether we like to admit it or not, it’s clear that we want people to like what we do.”
Pokimane went on to say that she usually doesn’t have time to think about anything else in her life other than work. She says it’s hard to take time for yourself when you’re “staying at a screen for eight hours just reading comments about what people think of you.” Instead, she wants to dictate how she grows and changes as a person, rather than letting that do for her.
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“Looks like I don’t really want to participate in the rat race that’s streaming,” Pokimane said after a long sigh. “It’s hard for me to say these things because I feel… I don’t know, I have this fear – the feeling that people might be disappointed to hear these things. But basically, when I wake up today, I don’t want to run to my PC and play games for eight hours straight. “
Crucially, one of the things Pokimane notes during her explanation is that the flow grinding isn’t what it used to be, because the games themselves don’t play out the way they used to.
“I played almost every big, trendy game,” says Pokimane. “I hope it doesn’t [seem] Very casual, I must say, but today when I watch everything on Twitch, I feel like ‘been there, done it.’ I’m not really excited or passionate about anything, other than chatting and connecting with people.”
She prefers the out-of-the-box game to the on-stream, she says, which takes the pressure off. And she still loves games like Valuable, of course, but not at the “speed or frequency” that streaming requires. It certainly doesn’t help that the streaming itself is already starting to go awry.
“Even you [all] Realize it or not, the pressure is on streamers to follow every trend, capitalize on viewership, go live longer [person] next to them or [person] that they share similar viewership,” said Pokimane. “It’s just a super competitive industry, but ultimately the reason I’m saying this is because I’m at a point in my life where I no longer feel creatively satisfied to keep growing. In the past, that was fine because games I really enjoyed or something in the streaming felt new to me. But for now, it seems like I still want to be part of my arsenal, I just don’t want to feel the same pressures that I need to feel as a ‘full-time streamer.’
So Pokimane is pulling away from the site she already has a huge audience on. She’s interested in branching out into other platforms, which she has been doing on places like Instagram and TikTok, exploring fashion and other lifestyle content. It’s an axis, but nothing unexpected. The main difference now is that while she continues to focus on diversifying her content, she wants to do without the audience, company, and contract pressures that come with streaming. full-time on Twitch or fully embed your brand in video games. around constant updates.
“The most important part of this, and also the hardest thing for me to say, is, to be honest, just matching my burgeoning content desires,” says Pokimane. “I mean my time off really reinforces in me this feeling that I have to want to do more than just stream.”
Kotaku Have reached out to Pokimane for comment.
At the same time, Pokimane announced that she was diversifying where to upload content, one of the biggest names in streaming, Ninja, tweeted that he “needs to rest.” As more and more major streamers reveal how burnout affects work in the last few years, it’s clear that professional streaming is going through some reckoning.
“I think I just want to talk about it so I can take that mental pressure off and feel free and happy to do whatever stuff I want to do anytime, anywhere. whatever,” Pokimane says in his video. “And use whatever medium and platform I felt fit to use in that moment…if people had been following me for that long, they were probably only interested in what I had to do. say or my life.”
