Streamers and youtubers these days can be a HUGE part of the popularity of a release and the thing is: they absolutely hate to read dialogues aloud when playing for their audience.
I never tried to stream anything myself, but to be honest, I can't really blame them. I would hate doing it, too.
I definitely agree that the vast majority of streamers do NOT want to read a ton of text aloud on their streams. I watch a lot of streams, and this is a given. It annoys me a lot, actually. I love it when a streamer actually puts in the extra effort to read everything out. Even better if they do voices for the characters. Which is super rare.
I'm a very small-time streamer myself, and I actually DO specialize in playing these very text-heavy RPGs and reading every. single. word. out loud. All the dialogue, all the books, all the journal entries and lore codexes and what have you. And I voice act all the characters. I'm not a professional voice actor, so my voices range from semi-decent to terrible, but I put a lot of effort into it.
Some games I've completed on stream in this style include:
- Pillars of Eternity
- Sunless Sea
- Tyranny
- Torment: Tides of Numenera (holy shit the amount of reading!)
- Masquerada: Songs and Shadows
- Disco Elysium
And a bunch of partial playthroughs of pretty much every other game in this subgenre.
I find it really fun to do, if draining. Can be hard on the throat, need to keep well-hydrated. I wish more streamers would do this, but honestly the audience for it is pretty small and niche. EVEN when you have someone reading it all to you, most people don't want to watch games that are based on a ton of text.
But I really hope that SOMEONE keeps making those text-heavy RPGs, because they're my favorite kind of game.
