PHS grad and Army veteran now finding his way as Twitch streamer

After graduating Portland High School in 2007, Peter Pohl Jr., more commonly known as Shawn, joined the Army and did a tour in Iraq. Following active duty, Pohl joined the Army reserves.

Today Pohl spends much of his time as a Twitch streamer.

If you are not familiar with Twitch, it is popular platform where video game streamers broadcast their gameplay and other activities. While sharing their screen, viewers can hear and watch them live. The platform offers free and paid versions.

Pohl says that he currently has little over 1,000 followers on Twitch, and almost 60 subscribers on his “Veteran Rage Gaming Channel” YouTube.

We recently reached out to Pohl with a few questions.

Question: What made you decide to start streaming on Twitch?

Answer: I've always had a passion for playing video games but what made me decide to start streaming on Twitch was I wanted to take my passion for video games and try and turn that into a career and help people.

Question: What do you enjoy about this type of work?

Answer: I enjoy a lot of things about streaming but overall the people that come into my streams even just to say hi make it worth it.

Question: What could a viewer expect to see in your videos?

Answer: Well I have it set on mature content warning because of things I can't control in some games like what other people say but depending on what I’m streaming at the time they pop in it could be ranked call of duty where it’s extremely competitive to something like custom games on Fortnite or Halo Infinite where we just all have fun doing either hide and seek matches to free for all or even media share streams where people can send music or meme's into the stream.

Question: What advice would you give a younger person interested in doing this type of work?

Answer: I would tell someone interested in streaming is starting out stream a game that isn't heavily saturated for example Halo Infinite has 1,035 people streaming that game you could have the possibility of having an average of 3 viewers compared to boundary where there's only 78 channels streaming that game which would give you a possibility of 64 average viewers to come into your stream. The next piece of advice I’d give is you don't need a pc to stream or stream deck and all the other expensive things. You can stream off your PlayStation or Xbox but with that being said I know with twitch you have to be 16 to start streaming on their platform so if you're younger than that I’d recommend YouTube to stream on. Another piece of advice would be to have a consistent schedule, don't give up just because you have 1 viewer in your stream. It's hard but you're not going to have hundreds of people watching you all the time, especially when you first start out.

Question: Is there anything else you would like to share with Beacon readers?

Answer: Everything that I make streaming goes back into the stream whether that be for giveaways or better merch ideas I have multiple ways to interact with my stream as well everything can be found on my twitch page under the about section at twitch.tv/veteranragegaming. My merch page is https://streamlabs.com/veteranragegaming/merch. Also I know someone will mention kick.com or might say it's better because of the 95-5 revenue split compared to twitch's 50/50 split as someone who has streamed on kick and tested it out it's not that great, views don't matter on kick compared to twitch where in order to hit partner on twitch you need average viewers, you can't make money on kick till you hit affiliate status then after that you can only make money from subscribers, their clip function doesn't work, ultimately I’d stick to twitch.

Courtesy photo.