The freshly baked Twitch streamer Maximilian “HandOfBlood” Knabe (31) was a guest at the World Wide Wohnzimmer. There he talked, among other things, about how it has affected his content that the salaries of others depend on his performance.
What was that about founding a company? HandOfBlood was contracted with the Berlin agency Freaks4u Gaming until 2018. Then he became self-employed and founded his own company. In the podcast “Saunaclub Susanne,” he talks about what it meant for him.
With such videos, HandOfBlood became one of the most well-known German gaming YouTubers:
“It’s really work then”
What changed? As HandOfBlood explains, founding the company was “the craziest or most groundbreaking step” of his life. For him personally, this mainly changed the way he has to “perform”.
Because: Suddenly, there was a company involved, with salaries that needed to be paid. “That has really changed a lot for me,” says HandOfBlood.
Before, says the content creator, he could just do what he felt like. Since then, however, much has been more of a compromise, explains the 31-year-old. A good balance is important to not become too commercial and to not lose oneself.
HandOfBlood says it is then “real work” when you sit down to shoot a video that you don’t really feel like doing. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that he is very grateful to be able to do this job.
You can watch the whole episode here:
“Had too little room to breathe”
This conflict between self-realization in content and commercial success also seemed to play a role in HandOfBlood’s decision to scale back the elaborate video production. Since mid-January, he has been regularly streaming on Twitch instead.
Aligning with the algorithms on YouTube and constantly analyzing statistics, the content creator describes in the podcast as “creatively distracting”.
Moreover, his videos may have been partly “over-conceptualized” – for instance, inviting a cool TikToker to appeal to a younger audience. However, he himself felt he had “too little room to breathe”; people probably would have preferred to experience him “in his pure form”.
On his own YouTube channel, HandOfBlood briefly summarized his switch from YouTube to Twitch. As the content creator reports, the switch was the right step for him, and he feels very comfortable with it. After the announcement, a great burden was lifted from him; he even “cried a lot”.
