Time zones, time slots and Twitch: When do game streamers go live, and why?

The role of time in game development has seen increasing study, but the role of time in creating gaming ‘content’ has rarely been explored. To explore how time is strategised and rationalised by content creators, I examine how game streamers on Twitch navigate dynamics of time and temporality in their broadcasts. Through semi-structured interviews, this article reveals complex and dynamic decision-making processes in the seemingly simple decision of ‘when to stream’, highlighting the interplay of geography, game genre, game community, and life commitments. I demonstrate how three main factors – pragmatics, discourses, and happenstance – combine to shape game streamers’ thinking about temporal elements of streaming. The article thus unpacks the multi-layered dynamics of these decisions, and how live streamers’ broadcasts become structured and routinised over time, which inevitably shapes and drives both the creation and the consumption of video content on the platform.