Alyce Rocha, known online as Alyska, streams video games full-time from home and has 585,000 combined followers. Her broadcasts focus on sharing reactions and communal experiences across diverse genres, from cozy simulators to role-playing action and horror. Audience composition remains predominantly male but female viewership has risen to about 10%. Alyce challenges stereotypes that women prefer non-violent games and has grown to enjoy genres her audience encouraged. Earnings are described as a respectable wage even as a smaller streamer. Building and maintaining an audience requires relentless work, with multi-hour daily streams and continuous administrative tasks.
Alyce Rocha makes her living working from home - but she doesn't have a normal nine to five. Forget endless Teams meetings, she's spent recent weeks living the (virtual) life of an ambitious Mafia upstart in 1900s Sicily. Such is life as a video game streamer. Known online as Alyska, she has made gaming her full-time career, by broadcasting herself playing games live, to her combined 585,000 followers.
The appeal, she says, is "sharing an experience together". "If you've played the game yourself then you want to see someone else's reaction," she tells the BBC's Woman's Hour. Once thought of as a male-dominated pastime, today women make up around half of the game-playing public, according to the UK Games Industry Census. Alyce says part of her role is challenging perceptions over the types of games women enjoy. Statistics suggest women mostly play puzzle and strategy-style games. These non-violent titles, including life simulators The Sims and Animal Crossing, are often grouped under the label of "cozy gaming".
But Alyce says she, like many women, also enjoys role-playing action and fantasy-adventure games. "I used to hate horror games," Alyce explains. "However, my audience loved to see me suffer, so I would play more and more, to the point I actually love them now". The make-up of her audience reflects this. While still predominantly male, she's seen female viewership jump to around 10% in recent years - a small but significant increase. Alyce earns what she describes as a "respectable" wage - even as one of the smaller names in the scene. Not that it's easy work. Gaming may be fun, but the challenge to not only grow, but maintain, an audience is relentless. "I'm always grinding," says Alyce, only recently cutting down from 12-hour days to six-hour streams, alongside morning admin, seven days a week.
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