How to start speedrunning on stream

Speedrunning is completing a game as fast as possible under an agreed set of rules. As stream content it has a rare property: it has built-in stakes. Every attempt can fail, chat can see the timer, and “will they get it this time” is a genuine reason to keep watching — which is exactly what most new channels lack.

The vocabulary, decoded

• Any% — finish the game by any means. No requirement to collect anything. Usually the fastest and most glitch-heavy category. This is what “any percent” means when you see it in a title.
• 100% — finish having collected everything the category defines as everything.
• Glitchless — the same game with major exploits banned. Often the more popular category to watch, because it looks like the game you recognise.
• PB (personal best) — your own fastest completed run. The thing you're actually chasing 99% of the time.
• WR (world record) — the fastest verified run on the leaderboard.
• Splits — checkpoint times through the run, so you can see whether you're ahead or behind.
• Sum of best — what you'd get if every split went as well as it ever has. Always faster than your PB, and permanently taunting.
• Reset — abandoning a bad attempt early to start again.

More of these in our streaming glossary, which covers the chat side of it too.

Picking a game

The instinct is to pick the game you love most. The better move is to pick one where you can be competitive within a month, because the payoff of speedrunning on stream is progress people can see.

• Short beats famous. A 20-minute run means several attempts per stream and visible improvement in one sitting. A 6-hour run means one attempt and a lot of dead air.
• Small leaderboards beat huge ones. A game with 40 runners has a reachable top 20 and a community that notices a new person. A game with 4,000 has neither.
• Active community beats dead one. Check the game's Discord and forum on speedrun.com before committing. A dead board means no route guides and nobody to verify your runs promptly.
• Check the rules page first. Every board defines its own timing method, allowed versions and legal glitches. Reading it after your good run is how people lose good runs.

The timer

[LiveSplit](https://livesplit.github.io) is the standard, free, and integrates with speedrun.com — you can pull leaderboards, download other runners' splits to compare against, and submit runs from inside it. Add it to OBS as a Window Capture and it sits in the corner of your layout.

• Autosplitters watch the game's memory and split automatically at the right moments, so you're not hitting a key mid-boss. Most popular games have one; activate it in Edit Splits → Activate.
• Load removal is why timing gets fussy. Many boards time runs without loading screens, so a fast SSD doesn't grant an unfair advantage. That's usually handled by the autosplitter, and you compare against Game Time rather than real time.
• Read your board's timing method before your first serious attempt. Real time and game time can differ by minutes, and submitting the wrong one gets your run rejected.

Console runs

Plenty of categories are console-only, or have separate console leaderboards. That needs a capture card into your PC — the capture card guide covers it, and passthrough matters more here than anywhere, since you cannot run frame-perfect tricks off a laggy preview.

Making it good to watch

• ☐Explain what you're doing. New viewers have no idea why you just walked into a wall. Narrating the route is the entire difference between compelling and baffling.
• ☐Keep the timer and splits on screen so the stakes are legible without explanation.
• ☐Talk through resets. Dead air after a failed attempt is where people leave. “Right, that's a reset, the trick is here's why” keeps the room.
• ☐Put the category and PB in your title. “Any% PB attempts — 21:40” tells a browsing viewer everything.
• ☐Clip your PBs immediately. A PB is the most clippable thing you will ever produce — see growing with clips.

The community side is most of the value here: speedrun Discords are unusually welcoming to beginners, and route advice from someone 5 seconds ahead of you is worth more than any guide. Our resources list has the main hubs.