Hey guys! My name is Joel, more known as Orb on the Internet. I’m a full-time Twitch streamer residing in Stockholm, Sweden, and I’ve been doing this gig for more years than I can count. It’s weird to say you play video games for a living but in my case it’s true.

I’ve been a part of the gaming community for a long time but originally started with competitive gaming back in the old Counter-Strike era. Obviously as any kid I played a bunch of console games, the favorites being Goldeneye 64, Mario, Perfect Dark, and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The last one is by far my favorite out of all of them. Trust me I love beating my friends in a 4-player splitscreen on Goldeneye & Perfect Dark, but the way I got caught in the story around Zelda was no joke. I would sit hours and hours trying to find all the heart pieces needed to ‘complete’ the game.

But my plunge into Counter-Strike was a completely different story. I had seen my brother play it and it looked so cool. The fact that it was multiplayer and you were playing it in real-time with other people somewhere around the world was amazing to me. In the beginning I really sucked. Like, I was completely garbage. I remember playing the game and being frustrated ALL the time because I was so bad but I kept playing due to boredom. Eventually I started getting better but that wasn’t after years of playing.

I started getting into more competitive style CS. I played for different teams and we would play online tournaments and cups and try to win glory and one day travel to LAN events to try and compete. The competition in Sweden is no joke. Sweden has for the longest time had easy access to home desktop PC’s and great Internet so that makes for players being able to compete, and practice, with each other across the country with a reasonable ping. This has, in my opinion, made us champions in so many different games and we’ve completely dominated during certain times throughout the years of competitive gaming. What I’m trying to get at is that the competitive level is really high. I was obsessed with becoming a better player and I fought really hard to try and join a proper team but I never made it to the top level. I saw this as a sign to get out while not sinking anymore time into it and that’s where the Youtube side of things started.

I had been watching some gaming channels on Youtube for a while but never gotten more into it than that. All of a sudden I found channels like SeaNanners, Hutch, and Tejbz, and started following them more closely. I loved the fact that Tejbz had an accent because that meant it was possible for somebody like myself to do it. I knew I was good enough in game in terms of gameplays but I thought it would be impossible due to my accent.

I decided to give it a go and started my channel and right of the bat I got THOUSANDS of subscribers!!! Yeah… not really. Just like everyone else I grinded and grinded away on posting videos with merely no one watching at all for the first year or so. It really started to go up around the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and that’s also when I started streaming on Twitch. I decided to really push hard to be known as one of the best and for a while I had more viewers than most pros did. But after playing MW3 nonstop for over a year, posting 1-2 videos every day while streaming regularly, I got really burnt out and had less desire to play CoD. But when you build an audience around being the best at something you have to maintain that. But I’ve had enough.

I decided to shift the focus from amazing gameplay to having fun and interacting with my community. This made it possible for me to play a bigger variety of games and it made gaming fun again. Sure numbers took a nose-dive but I realized that happiness is way more important than money. It sounds cliché but I realized if I could build an audience one way, I can do it again in a different way. And it’s due to the amazing people supporting me that I’m being able to do what I do. If it wasn’t for everybody watching and supporting I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

To everybody who has watched and continues to do so: Thank you. I have met amazing people, traveled the world, and gotten to have my hobby as my job. If this all crash and burns tomorrow I wouldn’t have any regrets. I am eternally grateful and humbled by the support I’ve been given throughout the years. You guys have changed my life forever.

Joel “Orb” Kumlin