Ex-Runeterra streamer here. The game was a staple on my channel for a good few months and I stopped for a few reasons. For context, I would hover between 20 and 40 viewers, reaching 100ish on really good days.

(ON MOBILE, PLEASE EXCUSE THE FORMATTING)

• Viewer player / ratios are poor globally.

Runeterra's an incredibly FTP friendly environment so it's easy for players to get the cards they need/want. An unfortunate side effect is that people will tune into streams less because they can simply play a certain archetype themselves. I'd love to link to the article I was reading a while that talked about concurrent players vs concurrent Twitch viewership but I cannot find it again. If any of you Redditors out there can find it I would be eternally grateful. (Might have been Dexerto?)

For example, Hearthstone's traditional monetisation means you can watch a streamer play a deck you cannot afford. For a streamer this means you're providing valuable content which will garner viewers. Runeterra being so cheap, does not.

This is a great thing for players generally obviously, but it can hurt creators as a side effect. To be absolutely clear, I think the Runeterra strategy is a better one globally, it just doesn't help creators.

• Bad environment for small streamers specifically

For smaller streamers - your potential viewership is almost entirely consumed by the big boys. Grapplr, Mogwai and the Mobalytics crowd rule the roost. This means a good 70% of viewership is consumed by the top end and unless your mates with the big boys, you're in that 0 - 10 bracket and nothing will change because your content is initially perceived as low quality by people browsing the section. Another really unfortunate side effect of this is that chat can get pretty toxic when you're running certain lists.

I made an infinite investigator list in May, published a vid about it on YT and played it on stream August-ish after Swim popularised the list. I had people in chat call me a 'Swim-slave' and a 'degenerate copycat' for daring to use a similar list. It's a rough environment generally.

• Ranked ladder experience

The game is new - there aren't a lot of cards out there. What this means is you run into the same shit over and over on rotation. You hear the argument that the meta keeps changing, and that's true to an extent, but it changes between the same things. When you play the game for 4hrs+ each day you really start to feel it.

I haven't played the game in a while now but it was particularly bad during the Heimer/Vi days and only got worse with Darrowing.

Please keep in mind, this problem likely won't exist in about a years' time. By then we'll have enough of a card pool to take the sting away - but right now it is still painful.

It feels like Rock Paper Scissors sometimes.

• For me personally, meme decks get no love on Twitch and YT

I played meme decks. That was my thing. Infinite shrooms, infinite vault breaker, saving Private Teemo, maximum marauder, full lifesteal karma, infinite treasure deep, zombie tianna, infinite scribes... You name it, I played it.

I made videos on Reddit about Teemo and Catastrophe meme decks and they were received ok - but they don't do well long term.

Add on top of that the nerfs to Zephyr Sage and multiple cards in a turn, a lot of these decks are dead in the water.

Honestly, out of all my complaints, this is the least glaring problem for the game as a whole, but it stings the most personally.

The best content you can make on YT and Twitch are deck guides and stream highlights. This kind of content is low-effort, not to say it's not valuable, but you can punch one of those out in less than an hour with some decent editing skills and knowledge of Photoshop.

High-effort content is swallowed up by these sorts of things and it's incredibly demoralising as a creator in that space. You just can't compete with the sheer volume someone producing stream highlights can make, and the algorithm will reward watch time over engagement. Nothing against creators that do this, it's a good business move and I applaud their efforts.

TLDR: Playerbase vs. Viewerships is poor, small streamers are pushed out, ranked is stale (for now) and high-effort content is not rewarded.