Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.
Brycent wishes more people would give Web3 gaming a shot.
But he also understands why they’re hesitant.
“I think that Web3 gaming has done a poor job with marketing itself because everything’s been about NFT, NFT, NFT, when it should be about, Hey, here’s a really dope game, and the game has skins in it,” he says. “Who cares if the skins are on the blockchain or not?”
Those who’ve heard the NFT, NFT, NFT and crypto, crypto, crypto marketing for games and just stuff on the internet as a whole have likely also seen scams like Save the Kids and underdelivered promises from shady teams like the one that worked on Logan Paul‘s CryptoZoo. Brycent, who dubs himself “the Web3 gaming guy” on Twitch, says those projects have given Web3 a bad rap. He says gamers should think about NFTs the way they think about skins in games like Counter-Strike. Character and gun skins in that game–purely digital assets–are so in-demand they are bought and sold for real-world money. And a major part of why this economy works, he says, is the fact that Counter-Strike is a good game.
“When I’m partnering with a Web3 game, I only care about the game. I don’t care about tokens. I don’t own any Web3 gaming tokens. I don’t care about crypto,” he says. “I care about is the game good, and if the game is good, people will flock to it eventually. Ultimately, you have to start with a good game as your narrative and your driver.”
Like many other creators we’ve profiled over the years, Brycent didn’t set out to be where he is today. He was originally going to go to law school, but after deciding actually, he wasn’t all that keen to be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, he took some time off, taught himself to code with online classes, and ended up in software engineering. That job–and the COVID lockdowns–gave him more free time than he’d anticipated, so he returned to his teenage hobbies: gaming, and livestreaming.
“Now I was coding at home, I was at my setup all day long, and I was like, all right, well, after work, you might as well just start just gaming again and having fun,” he says. “When I found the Web3 gaming space, I was like, ‘All right, well, there’s no one really making content on this, and it’s supposed to take off.’ That was the market opportunity.”
Now, Brycent is a full-time Twitch streamer with just over 50,000 followers–and he recently signed with creator org XSET.
Check out our chat with him below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Brycent: My name is Brycent, Bryce Johnson. I go by Brycent. Now XSET Brycent, because I recently signed with XSET. I’ve been gaming my entire life. Entered the streaming world in YouTube world off and on in my early, I would say teenage years, realizing that it was a really cool career path, but never taking it too serious. Then after college, when I had way more time during the pandemic, I decided to jump back into it, and it was a really cool thing to do on the side. Although I started off with games like Call of Duty and eventually jumped into Counter-Strike, I actually found the most traction when I jumped into this new realm of gaming where there’s crypto and NFTs called Web3 gaming.
It got a bad rap in certain areas, but there are some good games being built, like Dr DisRespect is building a game out there. I really took off in that space, became probably the most well-known Web3 gamer. Here we are now creating content on Twitch, YouTube, all the streaming platforms, pretty much in terms of trying to get the word out there, but also jumping in and diving in on things I really enjoy more, so now a lot of gaming, but also a lot of lifestyle and figuring out where I really want to focus my energy, and staying consistent with the streams.
Brycent: I am originally from Virginia, but I am based in Miami, Florida. I’ve been there for almost two years now.
Brycent: I went to college for political science. I was actually going to go to law school.
Brycent: Yes. I realized that I didn’t want to go ridiculously in debt for a career that unless you’re going to the top 1%, less than 1% of schools, you’re going to struggle for a bit. Once I realized I didn’t want to do that, I took some time, got a job in tech sales, and I was teaching myself how to code. In like six months, I went from a tech analyst to software engineer with a full-time six-figure paying job, a couple of years out of college. All I did was buy a $10 course on Udemy and teach myself how to engineer, basically. That was the career path change. That change was huge because then it gave me way more time to actually play video games.
@brycent_ He wasnt expecting this to happen #drdisrespect #deadrop #gaming #twitch #lol #gametok #dumbwaysto ♬ original sound – Brycent
Brycent: Yes, coding played a huge part. I never thought Twitch and YouTube and content creation would be my career. During the pandemic, I went from working in the office and commuting every day to working from home. Now I was coding at home, I was at my setup all day long, and I was like, all right, well, after work, you might as well just start just gaming again and having fun. When I found the Web3 gaming space, I was like, “All right, well, there’s no one really making content on this, and it’s supposed to take off.” That was the market opportunity.
After work, I was just streaming and making content and tweeting, and eventually it got to the point where all of the content I was making, I was making more money doing content than I would’ve if I was just being a software engineer. I was like, “All right, we’re going to double down and go full-time on content, focus on brand building outside of just Twitch, and really focusing on how do you build a sustainable business around your brand.” In Twitch, sometimes you have months where you fluctuate income and all those things. The big focus was how can I be self-sustaining. Once I got to that point, I was like, “We could actually do this.”
Especially in Web3 gaming, where companies are looking to activate and there’s tons of brand opportunities, I got to the point where I was, even as a small streamer, making more money. I probably make more money than a streamer who does 1,000 subs a month right now. That’s like just me having a brand in other areas that really derive from my livestreaming on a regular basis. Once I realized I could go full-time, I was like, “I want to live somewhere warm.” That’s what got me down to Miami. I have not looked back since. I still visit home quite often, but it’s been a very exhilarating ride to this point.
Brycent: I think one thing you have to take into account is, Twitch, for me, is more so where my audience lives from a television standpoint. When people are looking to see me live, those are going to be your core followers, and they’re going to attend your Twitch stream. For every one superfan, there are probably 10,000 people who will watch your video content on other platforms and not look at it, or not interact with it, or not engage with it. You have to go through the cycle of a lot of exposure on other platforms, and then converting that exposure into maybe five viewers here, 10 viewers there on Twitch.
For myself, it was, all right, you’re going to grow on Twitch as a byproduct of your audience being super fans of you there. For your TikToks, your YouTube Shorts, your Instagram Reels, your YouTube videos, all of the content that you are making on Twitch is content that you can use and frame for storytelling for short-form and for other platforms to help bring people back to your Twitch stream. Whereas now, a lot of my viewership is people who see a TikTok video, or they see me on YouTube or somewhere and they’re like, “Oh, well, yes, I saw this video and you did this cool thing on stream, and as a byproduct of that, you referenced you doing it on Twitch, so I came back and I found you from Twitch. I found you in Twitch as a byproduct of other platforms.”
I don’t know if Twitch will ever get to a point where they go really deep on having some sort of discoverability algo that actually works. You have to understand it’s very hard to get people to watch something live. If you’re going to do it, the best way to do it is, how do you go get people from other platforms and bring them to your Twitch, whereas Twitch becomes your command center, and all of the content you make on Twitch is then distributed to other platforms to bring an audience back to Twitch. I don’t try to force people into watching on certain platforms. I think if they can consume my content in multiple forms of mediums, that’s great.
For some people, they’re going to do it more regularly than others. For some people, they’re going to be like, “I want to be at Twitch. I want to be on your Twitch stream.” Of course, there’s other ways to grow. I have some friends who are bigger on Twitch, and they grew as a byproduct of a game taking off at the right time or moment, or them getting a big raid from a streamer and then the rest becomes history, of course.
The best way I would say for myself to grow has been just working in terms of, if I’m streaming for four hours a day on Twitch, you have four hours of content that you could probably break into 10 or 15 pieces of content for other platforms, and cross-referencing that back to getting people on your Twitch stream.
Nadia is actually a great example of this. If you look at Nadia’s content on TikTok, every TikTok video she posts, it’s a highlight of her stream. During her growth process, it was a highlight of her Twitch stream. She would say, “This gamer said that I wasn’t one of the best female Call of Duty players in Warzone, and I’m here to prove them wrong. I did this on my most recent stream.” And then it’s like a link to her Twitch stream, and she’s having a crazy clip of her being cracked at the game. People fail to realize how impactful that is to growing a stream, you’ve got to really sell yourself outside of Twitch if you want to grow. It’s no longer, “Hey, I’m just going to go live on Twitch and grow.” Because there are thousands and thousands of thousands, if not millions, of Twitch streamers.
I think the biggest thing is people have to realize that distribution is powerful, and using distribution on multiple platforms is how you bring people back to your Twitch, not you streaming on Twitch and then people going on other platforms and finding you as a byproduct of Twitch, is normally you have to take that content and go out and make that content work for you.
Brycent: A hundred percent.
Brycent: From my perspective, most of the projects in Web3 gaming are not games that are any better than your average indie game that you would see on the Steam marketplace. You have a couple that are really good, but from my perspective, I take a very, I would say a very focused approach. I only work with a couple of games, and most of the times I try not to do any brand deals with games. I like to do brand deals with organizations that are more so reputable.
The interesting thing for me was, when you look at the whole dynamic as to why NFTs and crypto and video games are a negative, to your point, you see the rug pulls, you see the NFT space, but before that, it was content creators in the traditional gaming world, it was people in FaZe Clan, it was people that were doing Save the Kids and all these weird scams that were taking advantage of their audiences. It gave the Web3 gaming world a really bad rap before we even got to a world where we decided if NFTs in a video game were good or bad because your favorite FaZe Clan influencer was doing Save the Kids and you lost $5,000, $10,000, whatever, however many thousands of dollars you lost.
From my perspective, the best use case for understanding NFTs is looking and seeing what happens with Counter-Strike digital assets. Skins. It’s no different. The word “NFT” is something that shouldn’t even be used to describe what this is, because NFT is just the actual token or the database in which something sits on. If you get on Netflix right now and you watch a Netflix video, you’re not worried about what database Netflix is running or serving you or showing you that video from. Most likely it’s Amazon’s AWS or it’s Google Cloud. That doesn’t matter at all. The only thing the gamer or the viewer cares about is, what movie am I watching, or what skin did I just pull in this crate.
From my perspective, I think that Web3 gaming has done a poor job with marketing itself because everything’s been about NFT, NFT, NFT, when it should be about, Hey, here’s a really dope game, and the game has skins in it. Who cares if the skins are on the blockchain or not? I think you have good or bad actors in both industries. You have people who scam in games like CS:Go, and then you have people who scam in Web3. I don’t think it’s a collective decider or indicator of what the gaming industry could be. What we see is companies like Steam who don’t really have anything to gain by the whole digital asset revolution in Web3. Yes, they’re going to come out and say, “Hey, we’re not allowing any blockchain games or anything,” because guess what, Steam’s already getting our money, and they don’t want to change their business models. That’s completely fine.
When I’m partnering with a Web3 game, I only care about the game. I don’t care about tokens. I don’t own any Web3 gaming tokens. I don’t care about crypto. I care about is the game good, and if the game is good, people will flock to it eventually. Ultimately, you have to start with a good game as your narrative and your driver. I think that has put my brand in a good spot to be very reputable and authentic, and then also keeping me away from the scams, the rug pulls and all of that stuff that you don’t want to put in front of gamers, because that’s the stuff that is the major turnoff even for myself.
Brycent: I’ve run my own tournaments in Dr DisRespect game, Deadrop. We haven’t partnered with him directly, but I have run my own tournaments there, and it’s been really cool and exciting, and a lot of people have enjoyed it. There’s a game called Illuvium. I streamed it on the front page of Twitch a week and a half ago, and it was sick. It was cool. People loved it. It gives off this very much like Avatar vibe.
Brycent: Yes. That’s actually a very good comparison. There are a couple of games that I think are doing things the right way. Then one that Myth is very big on is called Shrapnel. Those are probably three of the games in the space that I think can do very well. I also just think a lot of it is experimentation. I’m very much someone who enjoys the whole going down the indie game rabbit hole and seeing what’s out there. I don’t think every game has to be AAA. You have games that are Roblox-quality that do well. I would say those are a couple that I think are going to be incredibly impactful.
Brycent: I think a lot of the games are moving in a world to where now they’re going to be free to play at the very root, so you’re not forced to buy an NFT or crypto or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, which is really good because it gets to the point where it’s like, all right, if your game is good, let us play it for free. If I like it, then I’ll buy a skin in it because I think it’s cool and not a, “Hey, buy this $500 NFT and then that gives you access to the game.” That sounds like a scam. I can get a Nintendo Switch for $400 or $500. What are we saying?
Brycent: I think that those guys really give the industry or all of the crypto industry a bad rap, but it’s also a thing of, who cares if you have a digital skin in a game that you can own and sell wherever you want to sell it, if the game sucks? If the game doesn’t compare to what I’m currently playing in Web2, I’m not going to care if I can sell this because there’s no market to even sell it. No one cares about it. I think it’s very important to take into account. It does not matter what technology’s behind the game if the game isn’t inherently incredible.
@brycent_ Fortnite player is winning the $1 million dollar video game tournament for #dookeydash #bayc #gaming #fortnite #fortniteclips ♬ original sound – Brycent
Brycent: We were chatting with a couple of orgs at various times throughout the space. At one point, I got invited out to visit the 100 Thieves’ compound, and I was streaming there, and it was fun, and we chatted with them about the possibility of doing something. Chatted with OpTic. We hung out to talk about the idea of potentially signing at one point. We’ve had some pretty big conversations.
I would say that the crypto bear market definitely played a role into it. I think one of the organizations actually lost, they were going to have a crypto sponsor, but lost the crypto sponsor when the market fell very poorly. Everything has to happen in the right timing and the right moment.
When XSET came into the fray, it was very much associated on, “Hey, you’re the Web3 gaming guy, everyone knows you for that. How do we help you build outside of Web3 gaming, but also build in a way that changes the perspectives on Web3 gaming?” Because for their perspective, they want to be innovating in the space and help bring gaming to Web3 without it feeling like a shill or a rug pull or a scam. When they saw me, they were like, “Hey, we can do cool things in this space and work together.” From my perspective, it made a ton of sense. They aligned very closely with the vision. I like how excited their team was about the idea of working with the Web3 gamer. I think that for the most part, you think about the bigger orgs and you’re like, “Oh man, you want to go as big as possible.”
For me, it was I want to be somewhere where I’m going to be valued. I look at a lot of the big orgs, and I think they’re great, but I never wanted to be on an org where I look up in six months and I’m not doing anything within the org, none of my content’s being out there. There are a lot of orgs that sign content creators and then you don’t hear anything about them ever again after that.
XSET is like right place, right timing, right size, and I get to be an equity owner in XSET.
Brycent: So I get to have ownership in the brand, and I feel more invested because it’s now a thing of like, the work I do is bigger than just the content I make. I’ve gotten to work with them in terms of helping draft up proposals and ideas and really cool ways that we can do integrations with different games and companies and organizations. To me it’s like, now I’m not only merging my content side, but I’m also learning the business acumen and the gaming space. That’s going to impact my career well beyond my days of streaming on Twitch.
It’s been a really cool integration for the first couple of months, and I’m excited to see the content and the way that we can cultivate it moving forward.
Brycent: The crazy thing was, it makes sense if you want to build with someone long-term, because now they’re more inclined to be like, “Hey, I’d rather re-sign with you and keep building and growing out the brand.” Or, “Hey, Bryce, let’s get on a call and let’s talk about this proposal that we’re thinking about doing with XSET.” It’s like, now I’m invested in all quarters of the business in terms of mentally, and not just, “Hey, Bryce, you’re a content creator being paid to make content, and we’re going to sell you off into deals.” It’s like, “No, you’re a partner and you’re going to come in and you’re going to work with us, and we’re going to try to build the best and most impactful in the safest org, XSET.”
Another big part for me was they won an award for not only being the most diverse org, but the most inclusive from a gender and sexuality standpoint. For me, that’s impactful because there are gamers who look like me, there are gamers who look different from me, and everyone should feel like they have space to grow and be cultivated in a way that is comfortable and safe. Regardless of how many views a video gets, the integrity of the organization that you are a part of and those business values and also those personal life values are very important. For me, XSET checked all those boxes. It’s been a good fit so far.
Brycent: Yes, so a couple of goals. One, I am building out, hopefully, a larger tournament for Deadrop. I think if we can get it to where we need to, we have chats with their team this coming week. There’s an opportunity to potentially make an entire league around the game. That’s something I’m working on and getting deeper into that space. Then, two, going deeper on Counter-Strike. I’ve actually enjoyed going back and forth.
I want to expand, continue to be the Web3 gamer, but just be the gamer and focus my attention and energy on how do I share me across the gaming platform that I have and the things that really interest me, whether it’s in a video game, me streaming, or combining the streaming aspect with lighthearted and funny moments IRL. A lot of content, a lot of focusing on my own brand and cultivating that, and learning the business side of esports and gaming so that I can be my best self over the next couple of years, and expanding my brand as much as possible and being as helpful as possible.
That’s where my focus is going to be over the next, I would say 12 months, and also diving into the gaming investment space. I think venture capitalists around gaming and how that world plays a role is super interesting to me. Whether it’s doing a residency with a VC firm or learning more about that, I want to really dive into the business side of things as I do more content, because I think content is a distribution for a much larger gaming world. I want to be a part of what that gaming world looks like. That’s me.
Brycent: Yes, I would say the last thing is, I want readers to go into Web3 with an open mind. There is a lot of, I would say a lot of, not really propaganda, but a lot of negative press around crypto and rug pulls and all these scams, and it’s because there’s been a ton of bad actors, a lot of which have come from, again, the traditional esports orgs that just wanted to take money out of different ecosystems, but look at Web3 games the same way you would indie games. Don’t spend money on anything ridiculous, but go into everything with an open mind because 12 years ago, 15 years ago, you probably would have never thought that battle royale games would overtake arena shooters. You would have never thought that Halo or Call of Duty would eventually succumb to Fortnite and say, “Hey, we need to create our own version of this battle royale. You never know what the world holds, and at the end of the day, gaming is where we invest our time, energy, and effort. If there is ever a world where that can be more valued, I think it’s a benefit for the long term in gaming.
Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.Brycent wishes more people would give Web3 gaming a shot.
But he also understands why they’re hesitant.
“I think that Web3 gaming has done a poor job with marketing itself because everything’s been about NFT, NFT, NFT, when it should be about, Hey, here’s a really dope game, and the game has skins in it,” he says. “Who cares if the skins are on the blockchain or not?”
Those who’ve heard the NFT, NFT, NFT and crypto, crypto, crypto marketing for games and just stuff on the internet as a whole have likely also seen scams like Save the Kids and underdelivered promises from shady teams like the one that worked on Logan Paul‘s CryptoZoo. Brycent, who dubs himself “the Web3 gaming guy” on Twitch, says those projects have given Web3 a bad rap. He says gamers should think about NFTs the way they think about skins in games like Counter-Strike. Character and gun skins in that game–purely digital assets–are so in-demand they are bought and sold for real-world money. And a major part of why this economy works, he says, is the fact that Counter-Strike is a good game.
“When I’m partnering with a Web3 game, I only care about the game. I don’t care about tokens. I don’t own any Web3 gaming tokens. I don’t care about crypto,” he says. “I care about is the game good, and if the game is good, people will flock to it eventually. Ultimately, you have to start with a good game as your narrative and your driver.”
Like many other creators we’ve profiled over the years, Brycent didn’t set out to be where he is today. He was originally going to go to law school, but after deciding actually, he wasn’t all that keen to be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, he took some time off, taught himself to code with online classes, and ended up in software engineering. That job–and the COVID lockdowns–gave him more free time than he’d anticipated, so he returned to his teenage hobbies: gaming, and livestreaming.
“Now I was coding at home, I was at my setup all day long, and I was like, all right, well, after work, you might as well just start just gaming again and having fun,” he says. “When I found the Web3 gaming space, I was like, ‘All right, well, there’s no one really making content on this, and it’s supposed to take off.’ That was the market opportunity.”
Now, Brycent is a full-time Twitch streamer with just over 50,000 followers–and he recently signed with creator org XSET.
Check out our chat with him below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Brycent: My name is Brycent, Bryce Johnson. I go by Brycent. Now XSET Brycent, because I recently signed with XSET. I’ve been gaming my entire life. Entered the streaming world in YouTube world off and on in my early, I would say teenage years, realizing that it was a really cool career path, but never taking it too serious. Then after college, when I had way more time during the pandemic, I decided to jump back into it, and it was a really cool thing to do on the side. Although I started off with games like Call of Duty and eventually jumped into Counter-Strike, I actually found the most traction when I jumped into this new realm of gaming where there’s crypto and NFTs called Web3 gaming.
It got a bad rap in certain areas, but there are some good games being built, like Dr DisRespect is building a game out there. I really took off in that space, became probably the most well-known Web3 gamer. Here we are now creating content on Twitch, YouTube, all the streaming platforms, pretty much in terms of trying to get the word out there, but also jumping in and diving in on things I really enjoy more, so now a lot of gaming, but also a lot of lifestyle and figuring out where I really want to focus my energy, and staying consistent with the streams.
Brycent: I am originally from Virginia, but I am based in Miami, Florida. I’ve been there for almost two years now.
Brycent: I went to college for political science. I was actually going to go to law school.
Brycent: Yes. I realized that I didn’t want to go ridiculously in debt for a career that unless you’re going to the top 1%, less than 1% of schools, you’re going to struggle for a bit. Once I realized I didn’t want to do that, I took some time, got a job in tech sales, and I was teaching myself how to code. In like six months, I went from a tech analyst to software engineer with a full-time six-figure paying job, a couple of years out of college. All I did was buy a $10 course on Udemy and teach myself how to engineer, basically. That was the career path change. That change was huge because then it gave me way more time to actually play video games.
Brycent: Yes, coding played a huge part. I never thought Twitch and YouTube and content creation would be my career. During the pandemic, I went from working in the office and commuting every day to working from home. Now I was coding at home, I was at my setup all day long, and I was like, all right, well, after work, you might as well just start just gaming again and having fun. When I found the Web3 gaming space, I was like, “All right, well, there’s no one really making content on this, and it’s supposed to take off.” That was the market opportunity.
After work, I was just streaming and making content and tweeting, and eventually it got to the point where all of the content I was making, I was making more money doing content than I would’ve if I was just being a software engineer. I was like, “All right, we’re going to double down and go full-time on content, focus on brand building outside of just Twitch, and really focusing on how do you build a sustainable business around your brand.” In Twitch, sometimes you have months where you fluctuate income and all those things. The big focus was how can I be self-sustaining. Once I got to that point, I was like, “We could actually do this.”
Especially in Web3 gaming, where companies are looking to activate and there’s tons of brand opportunities, I got to the point where I was, even as a small streamer, making more money. I probably make more money than a streamer who does 1,000 subs a month right now. That’s like just me having a brand in other areas that really derive from my livestreaming on a regular basis. Once I realized I could go full-time, I was like, “I want to live somewhere warm.” That’s what got me down to Miami. I have not looked back since. I still visit home quite often, but it’s been a very exhilarating ride to this point.
Brycent: I think one thing you have to take into account is, Twitch, for me, is more so where my audience lives from a television standpoint. When people are looking to see me live, those are going to be your core followers, and they’re going to attend your Twitch stream. For every one superfan, there are probably 10,000 people who will watch your video content on other platforms and not look at it, or not interact with it, or not engage with it. You have to go through the cycle of a lot of exposure on other platforms, and then converting that exposure into maybe five viewers here, 10 viewers there on Twitch.
For myself, it was, all right, you’re going to grow on Twitch as a byproduct of your audience being super fans of you there. For your TikToks, your YouTube Shorts, your Instagram Reels, your YouTube videos, all of the content that you are making on Twitch is content that you can use and frame for storytelling for short-form and for other platforms to help bring people back to your Twitch stream. Whereas now, a lot of my viewership is people who see a TikTok video, or they see me on YouTube or somewhere and they’re like, “Oh, well, yes, I saw this video and you did this cool thing on stream, and as a byproduct of that, you referenced you doing it on Twitch, so I came back and I found you from Twitch. I found you in Twitch as a byproduct of other platforms.”
I don’t know if Twitch will ever get to a point where they go really deep on having some sort of discoverability algo that actually works. You have to understand it’s very hard to get people to watch something live. If you’re going to do it, the best way to do it is, how do you go get people from other platforms and bring them to your Twitch, whereas Twitch becomes your command center, and all of the content you make on Twitch is then distributed to other platforms to bring an audience back to Twitch. I don’t try to force people into watching on certain platforms. I think if they can consume my content in multiple forms of mediums, that’s great.
For some people, they’re going to do it more regularly than others. For some people, they’re going to be like, “I want to be at Twitch. I want to be on your Twitch stream.” Of course, there’s other ways to grow. I have some friends who are bigger on Twitch, and they grew as a byproduct of a game taking off at the right time or moment, or them getting a big raid from a streamer and then the rest becomes history, of course.
The best way I would say for myself to grow has been just working in terms of, if I’m streaming for four hours a day on Twitch, you have four hours of content that you could probably break into 10 or 15 pieces of content for other platforms, and cross-referencing that back to getting people on your Twitch stream.
Nadia is actually a great example of this. If you look at Nadia’s content on TikTok, every TikTok video she posts, it’s a highlight of her stream. During her growth process, it was a highlight of her Twitch stream. She would say, “This gamer said that I wasn’t one of the best female Call of Duty players in Warzone, and I’m here to prove them wrong. I did this on my most recent stream.” And then it’s like a link to her Twitch stream, and she’s having a crazy clip of her being cracked at the game. People fail to realize how impactful that is to growing a stream, you’ve got to really sell yourself outside of Twitch if you want to grow. It’s no longer, “Hey, I’m just going to go live on Twitch and grow.” Because there are thousands and thousands of thousands, if not millions, of Twitch streamers.
I think the biggest thing is people have to realize that distribution is powerful, and using distribution on multiple platforms is how you bring people back to your Twitch, not you streaming on Twitch and then people going on other platforms and finding you as a byproduct of Twitch, is normally you have to take that content and go out and make that content work for you.
Brycent: A hundred percent.
Brycent: From my perspective, most of the projects in Web3 gaming are not games that are any better than your average indie game that you would see on the Steam marketplace. You have a couple that are really good, but from my perspective, I take a very, I would say a very focused approach. I only work with a couple of games, and most of the times I try not to do any brand deals with games. I like to do brand deals with organizations that are more so reputable.
The interesting thing for me was, when you look at the whole dynamic as to why NFTs and crypto and video games are a negative, to your point, you see the rug pulls, you see the NFT space, but before that, it was content creators in the traditional gaming world, it was people in FaZe Clan, it was people that were doing Save the Kids and all these weird scams that were taking advantage of their audiences. It gave the Web3 gaming world a really bad rap before we even got to a world where we decided if NFTs in a video game were good or bad because your favorite FaZe Clan influencer was doing Save the Kids and you lost $5,000, $10,000, whatever, however many thousands of dollars you lost.
From my perspective, the best use case for understanding NFTs is looking and seeing what happens with Counter-Strike digital assets. Skins. It’s no different. The word “NFT” is something that shouldn’t even be used to describe what this is, because NFT is just the actual token or the database in which something sits on. If you get on Netflix right now and you watch a Netflix video, you’re not worried about what database Netflix is running or serving you or showing you that video from. Most likely it’s Amazon’s AWS or it’s Google Cloud. That doesn’t matter at all. The only thing the gamer or the viewer cares about is, what movie am I watching, or what skin did I just pull in this crate.
From my perspective, I think that Web3 gaming has done a poor job with marketing itself because everything’s been about NFT, NFT, NFT, when it should be about, Hey, here’s a really dope game, and the game has skins in it. Who cares if the skins are on the blockchain or not? I think you have good or bad actors in both industries. You have people who scam in games like CS:Go, and then you have people who scam in Web3. I don’t think it’s a collective decider or indicator of what the gaming industry could be. What we see is companies like Steam who don’t really have anything to gain by the whole digital asset revolution in Web3. Yes, they’re going to come out and say, “Hey, we’re not allowing any blockchain games or anything,” because guess what, Steam’s already getting our money, and they don’t want to change their business models. That’s completely fine.
When I’m partnering with a Web3 game, I only care about the game. I don’t care about tokens. I don’t own any Web3 gaming tokens. I don’t care about crypto. I care about is the game good, and if the game is good, people will flock to it eventually. Ultimately, you have to start with a good game as your narrative and your driver. I think that has put my brand in a good spot to be very reputable and authentic, and then also keeping me away from the scams, the rug pulls and all of that stuff that you don’t want to put in front of gamers, because that’s the stuff that is the major turnoff even for myself.
Brycent: I’ve run my own tournaments in Dr DisRespect game, Deadrop. We haven’t partnered with him directly, but I have run my own tournaments there, and it’s been really cool and exciting, and a lot of people have enjoyed it. There’s a game called Illuvium. I streamed it on the front page of Twitch a week and a half ago, and it was sick. It was cool. People loved it. It gives off this very much like Avatar vibe.
Brycent: Yes. That’s actually a very good comparison. There are a couple of games that I think are doing things the right way. Then one that Myth is very big on is called Shrapnel. Those are probably three of the games in the space that I think can do very well. I also just think a lot of it is experimentation. I’m very much someone who enjoys the whole going down the indie game rabbit hole and seeing what’s out there. I don’t think every game has to be AAA. You have games that are Roblox-quality that do well. I would say those are a couple that I think are going to be incredibly impactful.
Brycent: I think a lot of the games are moving in a world to where now they’re going to be free to play at the very root, so you’re not forced to buy an NFT or crypto or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, which is really good because it gets to the point where it’s like, all right, if your game is good, let us play it for free. If I like it, then I’ll buy a skin in it because I think it’s cool and not a, “Hey, buy this $500 NFT and then that gives you access to the game.” That sounds like a scam. I can get a Nintendo Switch for $400 or $500. What are we saying?
Brycent: I think that those guys really give the industry or all of the crypto industry a bad rap, but it’s also a thing of, who cares if you have a digital skin in a game that you can own and sell wherever you want to sell it, if the game sucks? If the game doesn’t compare to what I’m currently playing in Web2, I’m not going to care if I can sell this because there’s no market to even sell it. No one cares about it. I think it’s very important to take into account. It does not matter what technology’s behind the game if the game isn’t inherently incredible.
Brycent: We were chatting with a couple of orgs at various times throughout the space. At one point, I got invited out to visit the 100 Thieves’ compound, and I was streaming there, and it was fun, and we chatted with them about the possibility of doing something. Chatted with OpTic. We hung out to talk about the idea of potentially signing at one point. We’ve had some pretty big conversations.
I would say that the crypto bear market definitely played a role into it. I think one of the organizations actually lost, they were going to have a crypto sponsor, but lost the crypto sponsor when the market fell very poorly. Everything has to happen in the right timing and the right moment.
When XSET came into the fray, it was very much associated on, “Hey, you’re the Web3 gaming guy, everyone knows you for that. How do we help you build outside of Web3 gaming, but also build in a way that changes the perspectives on Web3 gaming?” Because for their perspective, they want to be innovating in the space and help bring gaming to Web3 without it feeling like a shill or a rug pull or a scam. When they saw me, they were like, “Hey, we can do cool things in this space and work together.” From my perspective, it made a ton of sense. They aligned very closely with the vision. I like how excited their team was about the idea of working with the Web3 gamer. I think that for the most part, you think about the bigger orgs and you’re like, “Oh man, you want to go as big as possible.”
For me, it was I want to be somewhere where I’m going to be valued. I look at a lot of the big orgs, and I think they’re great, but I never wanted to be on an org where I look up in six months and I’m not doing anything within the org, none of my content’s being out there. There are a lot of orgs that sign content creators and then you don’t hear anything about them ever again after that.
XSET is like right place, right timing, right size, and I get to be an equity owner in XSET.
Brycent: So I get to have ownership in the brand, and I feel more invested because it’s now a thing of like, the work I do is bigger than just the content I make. I’ve gotten to work with them in terms of helping draft up proposals and ideas and really cool ways that we can do integrations with different games and companies and organizations. To me it’s like, now I’m not only merging my content side, but I’m also learning the business acumen and the gaming space. That’s going to impact my career well beyond my days of streaming on Twitch.
It’s been a really cool integration for the first couple of months, and I’m excited to see the content and the way that we can cultivate it moving forward.
Brycent: The crazy thing was, it makes sense if you want to build with someone long-term, because now they’re more inclined to be like, “Hey, I’d rather re-sign with you and keep building and growing out the brand.” Or, “Hey, Bryce, let’s get on a call and let’s talk about this proposal that we’re thinking about doing with XSET.” It’s like, now I’m invested in all quarters of the business in terms of mentally, and not just, “Hey, Bryce, you’re a content creator being paid to make content, and we’re going to sell you off into deals.” It’s like, “No, you’re a partner and you’re going to come in and you’re going to work with us, and we’re going to try to build the best and most impactful in the safest org, XSET.”
Another big part for me was they won an award for not only being the most diverse org, but the most inclusive from a gender and sexuality standpoint. For me, that’s impactful because there are gamers who look like me, there are gamers who look different from me, and everyone should feel like they have space to grow and be cultivated in a way that is comfortable and safe. Regardless of how many views a video gets, the integrity of the organization that you are a part of and those business values and also those personal life values are very important. For me, XSET checked all those boxes. It’s been a good fit so far.
Brycent: Yes, so a couple of goals. One, I am building out, hopefully, a larger tournament for Deadrop. I think if we can get it to where we need to, we have chats with their team this coming week. There’s an opportunity to potentially make an entire league around the game. That’s something I’m working on and getting deeper into that space. Then, two, going deeper on Counter-Strike. I’ve actually enjoyed going back and forth.
I want to expand, continue to be the Web3 gamer, but just be the gamer and focus my attention and energy on how do I share me across the gaming platform that I have and the things that really interest me, whether it’s in a video game, me streaming, or combining the streaming aspect with lighthearted and funny moments IRL. A lot of content, a lot of focusing on my own brand and cultivating that, and learning the business side of esports and gaming so that I can be my best self over the next couple of years, and expanding my brand as much as possible and being as helpful as possible.
That’s where my focus is going to be over the next, I would say 12 months, and also diving into the gaming investment space. I think venture capitalists around gaming and how that world plays a role is super interesting to me. Whether it’s doing a residency with a VC firm or learning more about that, I want to really dive into the business side of things as I do more content, because I think content is a distribution for a much larger gaming world. I want to be a part of what that gaming world looks like. That’s me.
Brycent: Yes, I would say the last thing is, I want readers to go into Web3 with an open mind. There is a lot of, I would say a lot of, not really propaganda, but a lot of negative press around crypto and rug pulls and all these scams, and it’s because there’s been a ton of bad actors, a lot of which have come from, again, the traditional esports orgs that just wanted to take money out of different ecosystems, but look at Web3 games the same way you would indie games. Don’t spend money on anything ridiculous, but go into everything with an open mind because 12 years ago, 15 years ago, you probably would have never thought that battle royale games would overtake arena shooters. You would have never thought that Halo or Call of Duty would eventually succumb to Fortnite and say, “Hey, we need to create our own version of this battle royale. You never know what the world holds, and at the end of the day, gaming is where we invest our time, energy, and effort. If there is ever a world where that can be more valued, I think it’s a benefit for the long term in gaming.
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