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I just recently finished a 24-hour one-man gaming marathon for charity. I've seen lots of people do similar things in the past, but hardly ever seen them do a post-mortem or any sort of writeup after the fact, so I thought I would take a little bit of time to share my experiences and what I learned.
Before I get started, I do want to really thank everyone who watched, donated, and participated in the event with me. I cant imagine being happier with how it turned out, and it was largely thanks to all of you!
The first thing that you should know: Doing a 24-hour gaming marathon stream is HARD. At least, it is if you're doing it solo. If you are part of a group and not responsible for the full 24 hours of play/content then it would probably be a lot easier.
You have to stay awake for 24+ hours. This, by itself, is pretty tricky. You will want to sleep.
You need to have CONTENT for 24 hours. Games to play, music (or some sort of audio), things to say, etc.
Caffeine can help with staying awake, but during the final hours you will feel it no matter what.
Twitch has taken a pretty aggressive stance towards folks playing copyrighted music on-stream. So either be prepared to not have music, or try to find some music you CAN use. Temp0 was kind enough to help me out, in this case, and let me play his awesome music on-stream.
What game(s) will you play? Can you play that game/those games for 24 hours? I picked two, Civilization and StarCraft II, because I was positive that I could play them for 24 hours without losing my mind. Also, you need to be sure that you can talk to/interact with the audience while playing. Civilization was great for me here, compared to SC2, since it required less focus.
If you are playing more than 1 game, figure out a good split. I did 3 hour chunks per game. This worked well for me, but when I was playing Civ people would frequently come to look for StarCraft and frequently leave when it wasnt immediately forthcoming.
Set a reasonable goal for your fundraising. I was pretty ambitious, I felt, in setting a goal of $500 for a 24-hour marathon. Why was this ambitious? Well, I'm nobody :D I am not a big name to draw folks in, so I knew I would have a fairly limited pool of donators. Thankfully, I did manage to hit my goal in the end, but it was a close thing.
Interact with your audience. A lot of my success came from awesome audience participation. I let the twitch chat dictate a lot of the things I would do in-game in Civilization, which led to hilarious trolling and good times. I also created a channel on battle.net so folks watching could hop on and play games with me. 3v3s, monobattles, etc with your audience are a great way to get them invested, and they're just a lot of fun.
Have a comfortable chair. Oh man, I cannot emphasize this one enough. I did my marathon in a wooden kitchen chair, for all 24 hours, and it SUCKED. Every part of me hurt by the end. Don't make this mistake.
Consider an event that is less than 24 hours. Seriously. 86% of the money that I raised was in the first 12 hours. It made those last 12 hours harder to keep going for. Having said that, it is entirely possible that people would have been less inclined to donate for a 12-18 hour stream. I dont know.
Statistics!! Ok guys, I wanted to make sure I provided some general statistics about my event. Keep in mind that this was a 24-hour stream, that started at noon eastern on a friday and went until noon eastern on saturday. Also, I'm not a big name (I dont think anyone knows who I am, haha) so that makes it a lot harder to get the viewer numbers. But here we go:
max concurrent viewers
35 (this was on friday)
average concurrent viewers
22 friday
13 saturday
unique viewers
660 friday
60 saturday
17 total donations, totaling $501
($250 from me, as I promised to match up to $250 of donations)
average donation, not counting my donation:
$15.69
donations in the first 12 hours:
$215
donations in the second 12 hours:
$35
 
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Grats on making the 24h marathon! Have to go offtopic, but where have you seen about the stance from Twitch about music? I recall many streamers still playing music from pandora / spotify without any consequences.
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Twitch used to ignore it but sometime in the last few months they sent out a big email to everyone about it
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interesting inside, good read. Thanks for that!
But actually, u earn so mutch more in the first 12 hours...i would have stped after that, or, say that u will stop if the donations wont raise...etc.
Good dedecation!
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On May 27 2013 05:12 Pyloss wrote:
interesting inside, good read. Thanks for that!
But actually, u earn so mutch more in the first 12 hours...i would have stped after that, or, say that u will stop if the donations wont raise...etc.
Good dedecation!
Well, I didnt know that the donations would pretty much stop after the first 12 hours 
Plus, I started out saying I would do 24 hours, so I didnt feel like it would be right if I stopped early.
But yeah, in the future I'm no sure if I would try to do that again. I think a 12 hour marathon would be just as good, and way less of a strain to pull off.
I would also suggest more preparation time. I decided to do this event a mere 3 days beforehand. More prep time would have been really helpful.
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Thing is 12 hours isnt considered a marathon to most gamers, they can pull it easily and some do on a daily basis. (I do it at least 3-4 times a week tbh, slack work op.)
Congratz on completing it and the donations!
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On May 27 2013 05:30 Capped wrote:
Thing is 12 hours isnt considered a marathon to most gamers, they can pull it easily and some do on a daily basis. (I do it at least 3-4 times a week tbh, slack work op.)
Congratz on completing it and the donations!
Yeah, I agree about that too. I would be concerned that 12 hours is too short. I wonder how folks would feel about 18?
I'm not saying people shouldnt do 24, rather that some other method might be preferable?
Maybe stream until you hit your goal? Of course, boy could that backfire on you! :D
Great point, though, that people should definitely consider!
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On May 27 2013 05:30 Capped wrote:
Thing is 12 hours isnt considered a marathon to most gamers, they can pull it easily and some do on a daily basis. (I do it at least 3-4 times a week tbh, slack work op.)
Congratz on completing it and the donations!
Mostly for this reason I would say you probably shouldn't lower the amount of time you're doing - it's really unlikely that you'll make close to as much money if you're doing something that most people who're watching you (ie. SC players on TL) do on a regular basis. I know I've rocked 16 hour days before on Dota and Starcraft both and if I saw you advertising a '12-hour stream marathon' there's no way I would donate because I would think you were ripping me off, asking me to give you money for doing something you may well have already been doing every day.
24 hours just has a ring to it that will convince a LOT more people that you're serious about what you're doing than 12 hours does.
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On May 27 2013 07:25 FilthyRake wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2013 05:30 Capped wrote:
Thing is 12 hours isnt considered a marathon to most gamers, they can pull it easily and some do on a daily basis. (I do it at least 3-4 times a week tbh, slack work op.)
Congratz on completing it and the donations! Yeah, I agree about that too. I would be concerned that 12 hours is too short. I wonder how folks would feel about 18? I'm not saying people shouldnt do 24, rather that some other method might be preferable? Maybe stream until you hit your goal? Of course, boy could that backfire on you! :D Great point, though, that people should definitely consider!
Streaming untill you reach your goal is something you could do i suppose, but obviously breaks would be needed.
I'd say something like 24 hours to 6 hours of sleep or something minimum. Dont be like those crazy korean bastards who raid on WoW for 3 days straight then drop dead.
Maybe 4 hours break out of the 24 would be better actually. I think you'd get alot of viewers if you did a 5 day marathon for a big lump sum with 5x20 hour sessions.
I dunno, hard to judge. Alot of people have their success with the 24 hour method, or a group thing where people flip in and out for days on end. I suppose they're the most "lucrative" (for charity ofc.)
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Yeah, its hard to find that good balance.
I have gotten a bunch of requests to do additional marathons like this one, so I guess that is a good sign :D Though man, I would need a lot of time to recover in-between haha. I'm also an old man these days (well, I'm 30. that's old by the standards of this community)
Thanks for all the feedback!
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I've also decided to get a new chair :D lol
I havent picked yet. I need to find something that isnt super-visible behind me on-screen. I have one of the DXRacer chairs on order for work, so if that isnt bad I may get one for home. That said I am totally open to suggestions.
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EPT
