Before We Go Live: Navigating the Abusive World of Online Entertainment

Written by Stephen Flavall

Narrated by Ray Chase

‘Starting out, I made three dollars an hour; then I made four, then eight. After a year and a half of streaming full-time I was finally making minimum wage. A couple of years after that I was signed to a professional team and advertising products to my audience for $1,000 an hour.’

Streaming video games is now a billion-dollar industry. In 2022, Twitch alone has over 140 million active monthly users, with top players earning millions each year. But success breeds envy, and when big money’s being made, everyone wants a piece.

In Before We Go Live, professional streamer Stephen Flavall, aka ‘jorbs’, invites the reader behind the scenes of this new frontier.

From the boardrooms of LA to doctors' offices in the Midwest, dealing with trolls and stalkers to mingling with crypto scammers and ruthless opportunists, Before We Go Live is both a true story about the dark realities of streaming and the tale of a deep and enduring friendship.

It’s about what happens when real life intersects with entertainment, and learning to act with kindness and humour in an online world full of prejudice and abuse.

This audiobook edition is narrated by Ray Chase, voice of Noctis Lucis Caelum, L, and Bruno Buccellatti.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spender Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739285920

Stephen Flavall

Stephen Flavall is a leading strategy game streamer as "jorbs" on Twitch.tv, where he has a growing 100,000 follower community. He holds multiple world records in difficult strategy games, and currently concentrates on Slay the Spire. After a brief but successful career in poker, he rediscovered his love of storytelling. In a live feed, he plays some of the most difficult games in the world, sharing his joyful and engaging thought processes with his viewers, and using the impartial and widely appealing rule sets of gaming to find connection with people from all over the world. He also creates YouTube videos, where his channel has 60,000 followers. At the age of 12, he immigrated to the U.S. from New Zealand, and now lives in Seattle.