“Treat it like a job, then you’ll take it seriously”
When game streamer Naman Mathur, 25, launched his YouTube channel Bolshcak in 2016, he was just a commerce student in Mumbai, hoping to land a job as a company secretary. He began streaming live gameplay videos of the popular multiplayer combat game Mini Militia, for the fun of it. Two years later, as PubG became popular in India, one of his videos went viral, clocking over 4.8 million views. That’s when people began to recognise him as Mortal, after his channel, and short for his PubG in-game moniker Soul Mortal.
More videos followed, and Mathur moved from game streamer to e-sports player. His channel has more than 7 million subscribers, and his Instagram (@ig_mortal) has 4.4 million followers. It took a while to adjust to fame. Like most new influencers, he tried to do it all at once, and managing his time was difficult. “I’ve learned my lessons,” Mathur says. “I’ve realised that if I find a method, I’ll never feel the pressure.”
That method was to pick what mattered more. In 2020, Mathur left e-sports to focus solely on game streaming and content creation. “When it comes to e-sports, you have to be there for the team,” he explains. But live streamers had other events and projects – it wasn’t fair to bail on other players. Streaming also takes only 3-4 hours of his day, leaving him with more time to spend with family or come up with more ideas for his videos. In addition to Mortal and his other channel Mortal Shorts, dedicated to highlights and fun snippets, he’s planning a third channel. It will feature him riding his motorcycle to new places and meeting new people.
It all works for him, he says, because he treats it like a regular job. “When I meet my close friends, their workday is similar to mine,” he says. His mother Kavita Mathur,
MUM WATCHES ALL MY STREAMS. AS SOON AS IT’S OVER, SHE’LL GIVE ME A CALL AND WE’LL CHAT ABOUT HOW IT WENT AND HOW MY DAY WAS.
watches most of his streams. “As soon as it’s over, she will give me a call and chat about how it went and how my day was.” Sundays are for meeting friends and family. “I’m not always worried about my user engagement and how I perform. I feel like I have to enjoy myself every day, it should never feel overbearing.”
The pressure, then, is not to produce, but to make the right choices when “so many people are watching you”.