It’s always more fun to play with friends. If you’re a PC gamer, then you can take advantage of the proliferation of broadband internet to stream your gameplay and commentary online, letting fans across the world tune in and watch you play. It’s a great way to make friends and have a little fun; if you’re a great player or just rage amusingly when you lose, you can get very popular very quickly, particularly if you play a popular game like StarCraft II, Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 or Amnesia.

This guide will show you to how to unlock that potential; how to get streaming online as quickly and easily as possible.

1. Make Sure You’re Ready

One important thing to remember is that streaming your games online will take up more system resources than just playing the game. If you’re already taxing your system playing the game itself, streaming may be too much. At the very least, you’ll have to decrease your system settings to compensate.

Generally, your CPU will be most heavily taxed by streaming so if your system’s speed in the game is limited by the CPU, that’ll have a more adverse effect on performance. Hard drive speed can also be an issue when loading levels, so if you have two hard drives it can be a good idea to record any videos you’re making to one hard drive and run the game from the other.

Another issue is your internet connection, specifically your internet upload speed. Generally your internet upload speed will be much lower than your download speed, and determines at what resolution and quality you can stream. You can check your upload speed by running a speed test. Note down what your upload speed is for later — if you’ve got at least 1 Mb/s up, you should be good to proceed with HD streaming, while slower speeds will require lower resolutions.

If you’d like to provide a personal touch, a microphone or webcam can be a good idea.

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