WHEN TWITCH FIRST BLOSSOMED onto the world stage, gaming PCs were in a very different place. Screen recording required some serious hardware to pull off, and programs like Fraps ate up frame rates and system resources incredibly quickly. In fact, it was very common for dedicated Twitch streamers to run not one, but two separate systems: one for the heavy-lifting video encoding and uploading (acting primarily as a passthrough system), and the other for the actual game they wanted to, you know, play. Crazy, right?
For many, the barriers to entry were just too great.
