You’re likely not talking as much as you think, but onto the more important notes - twitch is a terrible terrible way to get viewers due to its setup, it promotes and makes it easy to see those doing well and it is fairly difficult to find smaller streamers. Think of it this way, you can be the best comedian in the world, but if you’re in a back alley theatre that has a couple people coming in every 30 minutes to hear one joke then decide if they like you or not, you might have trouble finding friends or keeping people around; on top of this, let’s be honest, you may not be the best of the best.

So what do you do instead? What can you do instead? You have to likely promote yourself and get your own name out there, this might be the equivalent of hanging up posters and telling friends to come in the comedian example, but your friends might not care much (especially if its “just playing video games” and likely an ad in the local paper won’t yield much. Now you may be thinking “aha! Online promotion in discord’s, subreddits, Facebook groups will work though!”, unfortunately it probably will not be the case though. The reason being that again, you’re catering to a very specific group of people, and those groups that are interested have rules in place to guard against spam or have so much spam already they just ignore you outright. This has actually been proven in some smaller discord channels and Facebook groups as those who do allow it are flooded with spam.

At this point you’re probably wondering if I’ll ever get to the point, which I am but I feel it’s important to note the methods that don’t work as well, so you don’t spend absorbent amounts of time on things that don’t work like I have. So what does work? Networking quite a bit, and not the “oh hey I’ll follow you if you follow me” portion, more along the lines of actually spending time with another streamer and becoming a regular to them, and their viewers will come to know and like you as well (assuming you’re a decent person) and as a result you gain a new following. I can say this personally worked for me as I gained many friends by joining forces with my friend in college who I helped get started streaming. Another example is my viewers taking up streaming, and because of them being a regular, they started with 5-10 average viewers themselves. This I’ve found to be one of the best methods, but it requires more work and finding someone you click with that’s nice enough to help you out on occasion. It’s worth noting that these aren’t things you can ask for, it’s the people who just stop by and mention having streamed once that I promote the most, the more you talk about it the more likely I’ll be to not shout you out or even ask you to stop.

The other method that I’ve found to work is after your game asking people to stop by and give their thoughts or ask them to hang out (in better words than what I’ve used here). This only works with competitive games however and communities that are kind enough. For instance this worked well for Starcraft 2 for me, especially as people realize they need to help keep the community of their game alive. I’ve also found the larger the game you play (Starcraft 2 1v1 vs battlefield 1 with 64 players) you’re more likely to get people to join the less people you’re asking, in other words Starcraft 2 with only one person worked better than dealing with 64 people and inviting them.

Other than that I don’t have anything off the top of my head. Offering something like coaching in private communities that you do through your stream, or maybe giveaways or educational content can also work (giveaways are the least effective as people leave once a prize has been given), but nothing is the magic bullet to getting instantly famous.

I might also recommend sorting this subreddit by top and looking through some of the other available guides (and just how much work it can take to get anywhere as a streamer, nonetheless to 20+ viewers).