“Since then, a lot of things have been a compromise.”

The newly minted Twitch streamer Maximilian “HandOfBlood” Knabe (31) was a guest at the World Wide Living Room. There he talked, among other things, about how the fact that other people’s salaries depend on his performance has affected his content.

What was that about founding the company? HandOfBlood was under contract with the Berlin agency Freaks4u Gaming until 2018. Then he became self-employed and founded his own company. In the “Saunaclub Susanne” podcast he talks about what that meant to him.

With videos like these, HandOfBlood became one of the most famous German gaming YouTubers:

“It’s really work then”

What changed? As HandOfBlood explains, founding the company was “one of the most extreme or groundbreaking steps” of his life. For him personally, the main thing that changed was the way in which he had to “perform”.

Because: Suddenly there was a company hanging on to it, with salaries that wanted to be paid. “That has done a lot to me,” says HandOfBlood.

Before, according to the content creator, he could simply do whatever he wanted to do. Since then, however, many things have been more of a compromise, explains the 31-year-old. It’s important to have a good balance so that you don’t become too commercial and lose yourself.

HandOfBlood says that it’s “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 see the whole episode here:

“Didn’t have enough air to breathe”

This conflict between self-realization in the content and commercial success probably also played a role in HandOfBlood’s decision to scale down the complex video production. Since mid-January he has been streaming regularly on Twitch instead.

In the podcast, the content creator describes aligning himself with the algorithms on YouTube and constantly evaluating statistics as “creatively distracting.”

In addition, some of his videos may have been “over-conceived” – for example, a cool TikToker was invited to appeal to a young audience. But he himself had “too little air to breathe” and people would have preferred to experience him “pure”.

On his own YouTube channel, HandOfBlood took stock of his move from YouTube to Twitch. As the content creator reports, the change was exactly the right step for him and he feels very comfortable with it. After the announcement, a big burden was lifted from him, and at first he “cryed like a man.”