Streaming Magic: The Gathering online can be an interesting opportunity for your store—but it can also feel daunting if you've never tried it before. Kyle Huck, owner of Apex Gaming located in Caldwell, Ohio, United States, shares insights from his experience with in-store streaming.

Huck and his staff worked on their in-store streaming setup to help build their paper Magic community and give players a unique opportunity to participate at in-store events in a new way. Continue reading for Apex Gaming staff insights and five top tips you may consider when starting a video streaming channel for your own store!

Streaming tabletop Magic content is something that game stores can do to capitalize on the gameplay they have going on every week! Streaming comes with a host of benefits and may turn out to be a decent revenue source for your store.

Some of the benefits of streaming include extending brand awareness, creating online sales and additional revenue, and drawing players and customers to your store—we've had players drive over six hours because they want to be on stream!

Revenue may be small at first, then slow when it does start to come in. However, it could very easily cover your initial investment at a minimum, and then start to provide reliable income.

Perhaps the greatest benefit we’ve seen is the community you can build just from streaming! We’ve grown Apex Gaming's Discord server to almost 700 members and created a culture among players who are excited by our shop and want to be a part.

Here are five tips if you want to get started with your own tabletop Magic streams!

1. Start small and be consistent.

You don't need much to start streaming tabletop Magic: just a smartphone. The quality won't be great starting out, but the importance is in starting—during your first few streams, you will gain valuable experience that will help you iterate and improve.

Before you get to that, focus on establishing a schedule and sticking to it. Once you get a better feel for what you’re doing and how you want to do it, you can invest in better streaming gear. A decent camera should probably be your first upgrade.

2. Focus on your stream overlay.

You can do a lot to make your stream look professional by making clean overlays and nice transitions between your scenes. A stream overlay is a visual design made up of graphics elements like frames, icons, and transitions. They're displayed over your video feed and help keep viewers engaged.

Even if you have no knowledge of how to create graphics from scratch, there's an abundance of free assets online. If you want to invest some money into your stream, you can also hire someone to create an overlay based on your store's brand elements.

3. Create an area for a feature match.

A feature match is just as it sounds—a match of Magic between players that you've chosen to highlight to your community via stream.

Make sure players have enough room to play. Use playmats with your store's branding. If possible, try to provide a space for commentators that is virtually soundproof to the feature match area. Overhead lighting creates a horrible glare and doesn't work with paper cards! Your lighting should be on the side or at least at an angle that won't reflect up into the camera.

Here are a few photos of Apex Gaming's store setup to give you some ideas:

4. Take criticism in stride.

You will receive a lot of opinions when you put yourself out there online. It is important to be able to sift through the criticism and determine what is worthwhile and valuable, and what should be ignored. No matter what, keep streaming—don't let any comments deter you, because you will only improve the more you stream.

5. Most importantly, stream on multiple platforms.

Twitch may be one of the most popular streaming platforms, but it is simply not great at growing a following when starting from nothing. Make the most of your video content by posting on other social media channels like YouTube and TikTok.

Additionally, start networking with other content creators! You can grow genuine relationships with other content creators by spending some time in their chats, interacting with them on Twitter , or becoming a regular in their stream chats.

Apex Gaming built a robust streaming community through consistent scheduling and focusing on integrating it into their store brand. You can get started with building your own online community by creating a Discord server for your store. Try creating a Discord server for your store and see whether expanding your online community through streaming is right for your community.

This article was written by Apex Gaming; contents within are only suggestions and are not required by the WPN.