In a fun, spontaneous session at the virtual YNOT Summit last week by adult game-streamers Catjira, Rebecca Love, Spellbound Ashe and Johnny Poopdeck, the panel delivered an informative primer on how to draw more fans and make more money through videogaming and game streaming.

The “Nerds Dig Sexy Gamers” session ran for an hour and covered a lot of ground, from the role of Open Broadcast Software (OBS) in enabling game streaming to a description of the emerging Plexstorm platform, a rough shorthand description of which would be to describe it as ‘Twitch for an adult audience.’ To watch the full video of the session, click here. (And for more about Plexstorm, see YNOT’s introductory profile of the company published last October.)

The core question of the session is what I’ll focus on in this post. That question is, how do the assembled experts on the panel go about monetizing game streaming and making the most of the communities of fans and followers that grows out of engaging the gamer audience. While there are common elements to their strategies, each of the experts approaches the monetization process a little differently – and each stressed there are other options and mixes of their approaches which can also be effective.

The fundamental common ground between the approaches the panel described is the importance of effectively engaging your audience and building a connection with them. Addressing the question of what drives monetization in the game streaming space, Johnny Poopdeck outlined the approach he and Spellbound Ashe (who are collectively referred to as “Spellbound”) take. Johnny said in their experience, “it’s the entertainment value and building a community and a fan base that will pay just to keep you entertaining them.”

“If you put on a good show and you’re engaging – you can implement the NSFW stuff, you can take your top off, you can do whatever – but ultimately, at the end of the day, people are going to keep coming back because you’re genuinely entertaining and they miss you,” Johnny said. “It’s no different than paying for any other form of entertainment. People will tip just to keep you going. Just make sure that you engage with your chat and you build a community and you make them feel welcomed and special and like they’re missing out if they don’t catch one of your streams.”

Love listed a variety of ways she monetizes game streaming and emphasized the importance of drawing as much as possible out of the content you create as you stream.

“I’m one of those people that if I stream, I don’t want to lose any content from streaming, so I record everything,” Love said. “To make money, you got the tipping option and you can make it a game within a game.”

“You can also take that content that you recorded and chop that up for later use into clips, which I put on my OnlyFans, especially the dirty games,” Love said, adding with a laugh “not my Twitch… they could care less.”

Love said she also “sells time,” particularly to users who want to virtually fuck her inside one of the games. She raised another possibility for revenue generation, as well – one that’s commonplace in the mainstream gaming space but underexploited in the adult space.

“You can also get somebody to sponsor you,” Love said. “I mean, adult video games, I’m sure there’s people out there that create those games and want people to play them, just like Ninja plays Fortnite on Twitch – well, not anymore, but he used to. So, there’s all different ways to go about it.”

For her part, Catjira said the way she monetizes gaming “can be a little complicated” because a good portion of the money she generates doesn’t come directly from the gaming aspect, itself.

“I start from Twitch, where I’m an affiliate, so I’m able to make money through subscribers,” Catjira explained. “On Twitch, you get people to subscribe to you and they unlock ‘emotes’, which is like little pictures that you can have customized in your chat. That’s basically the whole thing about Twitch is getting emote packages. When (users) subscribe to a channel, you get payment from that, you get payment from bits, which is similar to tips. So, that’s a way that I make money directly while I’m playing video games.”

It’s the part where her fans follow her off Twitch that introduces a different wrinkle into Catjira’s approach, she explained.

“The big paying point for me in this is that those people are going to find out who I am and what I do and then they’re going to my adult platforms, because my whole adult platform brand is basically is basically video game, gamer nerd cosplayer,” Catjira said. She added that to be effective, your brand doesn’t have to be like hers – “people are going to want to see you naked anyway, if they like hanging out with you and playing video games with you” – the key is that fans and gamers need to enjoy the experience you offer, regardless of your brand or personality.

Catjira also explained that to encourage engagement, she takes things one step further than simply streaming video of herself playing games.

“Even on my adult platforms like MFC, the way I make money through video games while these people are coming over here is I do stream them naked and I get tips, but you can also make clubs, where it’s like ‘we have a game night and we can play together and if you join my club, I’m going to give you my gamer tag,’ or ‘you can play this game with me,’ things like that,” she said. “That’s how I monetize. I also get tips during the stream because it’s wildly entertaining to be naked playing a video game. People want to see that.”