Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar is a former Counter Strike: Global Offensive pro-gamer who has now become one of the OGs of Twitch. With the third most followed channel on the platform ,you’ll catch Summit1g on Twitch’s popular tab nearly every night. Currently, the streamer plays today’s most popular shooters like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds full-time . At TwitchCon 2017, after the content creator-dazzled All-Star game at the H1Z1 Arena, Summit1g spoke to Player.One about DayZ, streaming on Twitch and how to deal with tilt.
"I don’t want to be a guy that blows his load early and then doesn’t have a future.”
How did you start streaming?
“I was working at a LAN center at the time, and during breaks, my boss and I would look up random stuff on the computer. We came across streaming and I thought it looked fun. It wasn’t very developed back then — nobody was using face cameras and the bit rate was abysmally low. I started coming across other streamers like Sodapoppin and Towelie and I thought it was the coolest thing, thinking about other people choosing to watch me on their monitors.”
You’ve been streaming on Twitch since nearly the beginning, how has the platform and industry evolved since you first started?
“It’s a completely different world. There were no full-time streamers, it was nobody’s job, with the closest being Sodapoppin. There was no real money coming in. I was getting 200 to 300 viewers, which made me $20 a month. Back then, there weren’t many streamers or viewers. You have to give credit to ManvsGame and the rest, and now there’s this oversaturation of streamers.”
Is there anything you miss from your time streaming from back when it was a smaller industry?
“Oh yeah. Twitch has turned almost ‘trolly’ as it’s grown. Now, it’s all about cracking these jokes that Twitch chat come up with like Ocean Man and Trihard. You also get a lot more negativity nowadays, I’m not sure if that’s because my channel’s grown a lot or if Twitch is now just this giant mess of trolling, but I do miss the time when there was positivity on my channel and everyone was on my side even when i mess up. I was also into a couple more games back then, which made streaming more fun.”
What were your favorite games to stream?
“DayZ on ARMA 2. When you get on Call Of Duty, you know what’s going to happen: there’s going to be a team-battle and you’re going to try and get as many kills as possible. In DayZ, anything can happen. You can get into a firefight with the whole group and take all their loot or a guy can be walking down the street with a bible in his hand, preaching...There were tons of airplane battles. The airplanes would always spawn in these highly-contested spots, so the first fights were always over this airplane in the middle of this open field without getting shot. Finally, you’d get the plane and bring it to the airfield and fight in the air, it was fucking bonkers dude.”
Do you think there’s anyway to fight negativity in chat?
“Absolutely not. If you fight it too much and go heavily against the grain, banning anyone who says anything negative, you just come off as this fucking jerk that nobody wants to watch anymore. You have to roll with the punches and laugh with the trolls, unless things get a little crazy and you have to ban them. You don’t want to go head-to-head with them… There’s maybe 20 percent of your chat talking smack. You need to control it to an extent but you don’t want to be strict.”
Do you take breaks from streaming?
“Of the five years I’ve been streaming, I’ve never taken off more than five days.”
How do you survive?
“I love playing video games and streaming, so it doesn’t really feel like a job. I tell myself that I could be working at McDonalds. The amount of money we make is completely unreal, so the amount of time and effort you put into your stream, the more your community will grow. I think to myself that the time I take off could be spent building more and getting further. I’m at a point in my life where if I don’t do the party life, go crazy and save all my money, I’ll have a future. I don’t want to be a guy that blows his load early and then doesn’t have a future.”
Streaming that much has to be extremely stressful, how do you deal with tilt?
“I usually scream a lot, especially at the creators of the games. If you’re trolling for a bit and playing it up for chat, it can be pretty cool. I have to try really hard not to get tilted for real. I’ve had times where I’ve been mad at a viewer or something goes wrong on my channel. Nobody actually wants to see someone get really mad. The viewers don’t like that, so you have to try your best not to.”
Trying not to tilt and being on top of Twitch sounds like it has to be hard, what kind of mental stress does streaming put on you?
“Lots. After people leave full-time streaming as their main job, they are going to get therapy. You have to deal with a lot — a YouTuber chooses to read the comments on a video, but a good Twitch streamer has to interact with their chat, which can unfortunately have a lot of negativity. A celebrity can ignore the tabloids and doesn’t need to read shit about himself, but a Twitch streamer is in it, responding to it live.”
These trolls might just want to see you angry, how do you deal with a fan who might go a bit to overboard to piss you off?
“It really depends on what kind of mood I’m in. Sometimes people say shit that’ll throw you over and you just start swearing at them… The people hold the power on Twitch. They like who they like and they make the streamer. It is a little freaking weird, but at the end of the day, it’s on the viewer. Twitch used to be a place where you would just watch someone play a videogame. Now, you watch because you want to laugh, hear the streamer say your name or see a genuine reaction.”
You can watch Summit1G on Twitch and follow him on Twitter.
