WHAT TO STREAM on Twitch in 2026! | HIGHLIGHTS from Creator Camp LIVE (Feb 2026)

Hello everyone. We're so excited to have you here. Welcome to Creator Camp Live. I'm so excited to be one of your hosts today. My name is Snackless. I am a longtime Twitch partner. I've been on the platform for a very long time. I'm also an educator and at Twitch I work on all things Creator Camp. So you might see creator camp live, our creator camp website which is chalk full of really great stuff and creator camp sessions at TwitchCon EU and TwitchCon San Diego is where you may find me or some of the things that I work on. And I'm so thrilled to welcome back our co-host Orange Juice. Take it away. Hello. Yes, I'm a Minecraft streamer and Twitch ambassador. I do mainly hardcore Minecraft streams, but also the occasional like collaborative story project. So today's topic for Creator Camp Live is deciding what to stream on Twitch. And I realize that you may think that that you either probably think that that's a really simple topic or you probably think that that's a really convoluted topic. And we're going to talk to you about how you can make informed decisions and learn more about that. So we're going to talk about different types of streaming styles, choosing categories, using analytics to help make informed decisions, and how to make changes as you grow. There are millions of streamers on Twitch and understanding why a viewer would choose to spend their time watching one person over another basically makes up the foundation of almost every decision that you're going to be making during your time as a streamer. Such as what do you stream, when do you stream it, how do you present yourself, and if you want something to change, how might you go about doing that? Uh we've looked at in the past four sort of categories or arc types. Um, those in total are passion, skill-based, entertainment, and community focus. So, for example, passion. Uh, what might that mean to be a passion streamer? So, uh, you could sort of describe this as somebody who loves what they do and it's so much their enthusiasm for it is so much that it's almost contagious to the rest of their community. uh it doesn't necessarily mean that they're like the top of that specific game or they know everything about that specific game, but they definitely care about the game the most. Do you want to take one of the other categories? Yeah, I'll take skill because this is really funny. So, I started as a skill-based streamer and so uh not to like toot my own horn, but I used to play a lot of PvP games and I was like in the top 1% for PvP for Destiny. And that came because I had this huge background in Halo 3 and all of these other shooters. And when I first started playing, I was like, "Oh, I'll show people like how good I am at PvP." And then Destiny released trials and it was like this whole big thing and my like, you know, my content was taking off and then I realized that it was like really stressful and that I felt a lot of pressure to be at the top of the leaderboard all of the time and perform well. And so I pivoted to a community focus. The reason we talk about that too is because if if you like, you know, like Owen, right? If you are providing entertainment through this huge story on Minecraft, you've got all these people in corporate, you've got all these moving parts and then suddenly you completely maybe you don't even switch it on Minecraft, right? But you decide that you're just going to like make a farm and there's no story, there's no other people, there's no ch there's no, you know, it can be alienating for your viewers. And so we have some tips and tricks that we're going to touch on later about making shifts. But I do encourage you to figure out if you are passion, scale, entertainment or community. And then or maybe a combination of mostly one and a little bit of another. And then really lean into that and remember that even when you're playing a different game, people are going to be there for whatever it is. Knowing the type of streamer you want to be or already are is basically going to help for the next three things that we're going to talk about. There's a lot more nuance than you think when you decide what to stream. So, choosing what to stream will influence a lot of your creative direction as a streamer. But the good news is is that it isn't perfect, pardon me, permanent. Making informed decisions from the start will help you set up yourself for stronger growth and more importantly will make your time as a streamer be more enjoyable for yourself and your community. So, the first part of that is category. So, there are a ton of categories on Twitch. are hundreds and picking a balance. You want to choose a category that has some traffic coming through but not one that you might be drowning in. In terms of finding out the information that we were just talking about in terms of categories, uh there's something that we can look to which is the Twitch dashboard. Uh specifically the research tab, um you're going to see on the screen here. Uh this is a recording that I took yesterday um of Minecraft's category and this is on the research tab for Twitch dashboard. And you can see day by day over the last 28 days or the last seven days a bunch of different analytics regarding like peaks and troughs of Minecraft. But because it's such a saturated category, it's really difficult to kind of gain any information from that. So I switch it here to Darkest Dungeon 2, which is a game that I enjoy. But the amount of people that go live on Darkest Dungeon is very small. But you'll notice that these really high spikes. Uh, and we can actually draw some data from this. one person is going live at 5:00 pm pretty much every weekday uh on Darkest Dungeon 2 uh and they are very clearly a very popular streamer because the number of average viewers that we get um for Darkest Dungeon for example goes from about 10 to 500. So whoever this is, they've clearly found their niche and their community love their content. And if I was that streamer just starting out wanting to fill that niche, I would be considering two things. one, do I want to be going live at around 5:00 PM if it means I'm going to be in direct competition with this already very established streamer? And two, what can I learn from them? They've clearly got something. They've figured it out. What might I be able to be inspired from by them? Then we could also talk about standing out uh as a streamer. We mentioned building off of the foundation of uh passion streamers, entertainment, skill-based, community focused. And a couple of things that we can draw from that once you've decided on which one you want to like major into uh is with your specific category, you can keep in mind like, okay, if I'm going to be a passion streamer and I'm going to do Darkest Dungeon 2, that means I need to become well-versed in the category. I don't need to like be the best at it, but if I can become like a living wiki over the entire game, I live and breathe it to show how much I enjoy it. It means that when people come in, they'll kind of get that enthusiasm as well. Um, for entertainment, your personality and production value is what sets you apart in the category. skill-based. Uh, whatever category you end up choosing, it doesn't mean that you have to be the best at it, but the story could be join me as I pick up this new game that I've never played before, as I get better at it. And then the last one, which we kind of touched on earlier, is that community focus, right? So, that's where the category is a vehicle for conversation more than it is the focus. And then another thing to think about is the audience. Who is the demographic that you want, right? And so, who are you advertising to and what are you selling? Over time, the why of why you chose to do something might change. And that's okay. We're going to be talking a little bit about what it means to pivot your content in a little bit later. But it's important that as you go through the year, uh you check in with yourself. Um see whether you've shifted in the different core values. Have you accidentally found that while you were trying to reach diamond uh in a specific game being like really skill focused, you've somehow stumbled into having a really community f focused stream? That's something you can lean into if you want to. The Twitch dashboard is something that we mention a lot on Creator Camp. Um and I think this might be one of the first times that we're ever going to kind of like dig a little deeper into what each of the tabs do. Overview is a general summary of your channel. You can see this is actually these are my analytics for the past 28 days. With each of these categories, the question that you want to ask yourself for like the top bit here of overview is which analytics do I care about if any? There's stuff like subs, revenue, followers, average viewers. It's okay if you don't care about how many followers you get per stream. But if you change these analytics to stuff you do care about, it means as soon as you click on this tab, you get just a general overview. Another tab we can talk about is our research tab. So, we talked about this a little bit, but this tab helps to show the amount of viewers and channels that are live across the day. So, I find that really helpful because then you can know if you do want to go into a more saturated category, you know, when there's peaks and dips in that and then you can use that to inform when you decide you want to go live in there. And then the next one is the stream summary. Yeah, that's a very microscopic like view on a specific stream. Um, this one will have like specific numbers for different metrics for a singular stream that you look at. Um it also gives like a playbyplay of different metrics for the stream as they happened. Uh what you can do is you can select a random metric via the show me uh button that exists. Uh and you can look at a line graph and ask yourself what happened in these peaks and troughs and did I do something to affect these? If so, what might I have done? Um the next one is under analytics and it is discovery. So here you can find out where people are finding you. So is it directly to your channel? Is it from Instagram? Is there any is there are there any links any other places that you're posting, right? Are you posting to other social media sites that you're going live? It also talks about information on tags. That's also really helpful. And you can find out what tags through this. You can kind of figure out like what tags are trending, what you might want to try. Maybe you want to add in one of these tags to your content because it's doing really, really well. And the question here to ask yourself is, is there anything here that surprises me? And the last tab that you will find in the Twitch dashboard uh is the engagement one, which as you can expect tells you how engaged your audience is at any specific point. But more importantly, it also has a section that I think is often overlooked, which is who do you have viewers in common with? And what categories are your viewers looking at that aren't your content? And a question you can ask yourself for this is, do you know the other channels that your viewers are watching, and why might they be watching them as well as you? or if you want to reach out and to collaborate with other streamers that your viewers are already watching. When you think about pivoting, we have brought together some things that you want to think about and some considerations for you. The first thing is to talk about like what does that mean? Basically, it's making an intentional shift with the type of content you create. And as I mentioned, that could happen within the game. It could be the same game in a different style or it could be a different category completely because you find that that's better suited for you. A great practice if you're looking to pivot is communicating with your community. Giving them a heads up before you make a switch or even if you're like considering making a switch, you can be honest about why you're making the change. I want to like maybe explore this other completely different game because it has these similarities to the ones that we enjoy and I want to try something fresh. I always talk about starting with one piece of content and then switching. And Owen has named this bait and switch, which I really like. So, basically, it says to uh consider starting in a category or in a style of content that you know you like, and your audience enjoys, we really recommend that you do that first. So, for example, if Owen was going to stream something different and Owen came to me and was like, "Hey, I'd really like to also play RV there yet, right?" And I would say, "Okay, awesome. you should probably play like an hour and a half of Minecraft first. Bring your community in, get them involved, prepare them, be like, "Hey, we're going to do this first and then we're going to switch to this new fun party game and I hope you'll stick around. It's going to be great." And while you still may lose people along the way, you're going to get an opportunity to expose your regulars to that content more gradually and define for yourself what does success look like before you pivot. So, are you hoping to get more viewers? Are you maybe hoping to get more regular chatters or like engaged chat? Um, and lastly, don't expect an overnight switch if you do do something. Uh, try and try not to overanalyze every individual stream. You need to basically take a step back and see how does your channel perform on a larger scale over the course of weeks, maybe even months. Don't become obsessed with your analytics. Use them to inform you, but don't feel like you have to like live or die by whatever information is there.