Nathan Grayson
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Nathan Grayson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm doing well.
Yeah, I very much did. Also, I like that you have two of them for like symmetry. Yeah.
Yeah, so currently I write for a site called Aftermath. It's reader-supported and worker-owned. Me and a few other people founded it. But before that, I've been all over the place. I was at Kotaku for a long time. And then after that, I was at the Washington Post.
And as for why I write about video games, I grew up playing them and knew that I loved them and always wanted to get into doing something with them. And then when I was in middle school and high school, I just read video game magazines all the time. That's all I did between classes and when I finished my homework and stuff. And so eventually I was just like, how do I do this?
Um, and then one thing led to another and I, I did it.
Yeah, so the way that I describe it is it's kind of the story of Twitch as viewed through the lens of nine different streamers. Some of them are really big names that you might have heard of, like Ahsan Piker, Amaranth, Dream... And then some of them are much smaller.
And I definitely wanted to have both ends of that spectrum because I think that content creation and streaming are very different experiences depending on how big you are. And so, yeah, I didn't want to just tell the story of the platform itself because I think that a lot of people do that. There are books about YouTube and TikTok and things like that.
And they tend to focus on the companies and the people who brought the platform itself to life. But while there's an audience for that and while like some people definitely want to know the business side of things, I think that especially if we're talking about Twitch, people care more about the creators and the community because that's what has always made Twitch, I think, special and different.
And so I wanted to focus mostly on that.
yeah um twitch i i chose to cover it in part or i chose to write a book about it in part because i'd already been covering it for a while um and i started covering it like gosh i don't know in like 2015 2016 um in part because there just wasn't really there weren't really that many people covering it seriously like if you talk about
twitch from a journalistic standpoint you know people would write articles about it from time to time but way back then it was mostly just the basics it was like whoa people are playing video games live for money that's crazy um and then beyond that it was just like look at this thing that somebody did in a game or like look at this ridiculous thing that happened to some guy um and you know i i felt like people were missing what actually made twitch interesting which was all of the community building stuff and like all the ways that
this generation of creators was like reaching these new audiences and either getting them interested in games or other pursuits. And so, and then also just like the ways that Twitch itself as a platform and increasingly Amazon was sort of, you know, finding ways to make money off of these creators, not always such that they were taking good care of them. You know, there was, I think that,
There was a lot of talk of burnout even pretty early on, just given how much people were working and how long they were streaming, but not a ton of coverage of that until, you know, more recently. And so I wanted to, you know, I wanted to cover the kind of human side of all of this way back in the day. And that just sort of grew over time into me eventually writing a book.
yeah i mean we can start with the dj wheat stuff um because yeah so dj wheat is kind of one of the earliest employees of twitch and before that he was a very early kind of like live streamer esports commentator um he exists in those communities and without those communities i don't think twitch would exist
And so, yeah, as you're saying, he like ended up going into kind of more traditional broadcast television because there's this period of time where all of these like or where a few major like TV networks really wanted to get in on the ground floor of like e-sports and gaming and competitive gaming. And so they tried really hard to like pump money into e-sports competitions and whatnot.
And they brought on people like DJ wheat to help with that. Um, but it just, it didn't really work out. And so he ended up kind of having to go back to square one. He went from like,
you know appearing on television like direct tv and companies like that to being like okay well i guess this isn't gonna work this is just like it was a pipe dream it failed um and so he started streaming on his own and then eventually these companies like you stream got involved um and started like courting
these very early streamers because while on one hand some of these companies were trying to attract big names like snoop dogg people like that um what they realized is that when you bring over an audience using like a celebrity then that audience definitely shows up. You get numbers. But those people stick around for the duration that celebrity is on screen. And then they leave forever.
Or maybe a few of them stick around longer than that, but you're barely gaining an audience from it. But what they found is that people who like video games and who like creators associated with games
do stick around they show up regularly and those creators also like you know maintain regular schedules they're around all the time and so you can build an actual audience with that and that happened time and time again that's why justin tv which was the early iteration of twitch um ultimately became twitch um ultimately ultimately became gaming focused it always goes back to the creators in the community and that's where you that without that
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