Stefen Matias might best be known as the TikTok Genshin Guy, but his dedicated community of 130,000 followers across Twitch and TikTok ensures his intoxicating persona doesn’t go unnoticed. He’s an emerging force in the streaming world, looking to take over one sample at a time.
“I worked really hard, and I grinded forever even without any payoff for it. Regardless of that, I still feel lucky, and some days it really does not feel real… and I don’t know if it ever will,” Matias said in a phone interview with Lifewire.
From Canada With Love
Matias was born and raised in the Greater Toronto Area to two working-class parents. Mama Matias worked in customer service while Papa Matias supported the family through his work in maintenance. They were immigrants from The Azores, one of Portugal’s two scenic archipelagos, where upward mobility proved elusive.
They found opportunity and life in Canada, where the budding streamer and his younger sister were born. He describes his early life as a humble start that would birth his ambition and over-enthusiastic desire to succeed: proving fruitful for his streaming journey.
“I feel like my parents instilled in me that you should go for the biggest thing possible that you want to do,” he said. “They worked really hard to keep us afloat, so… I should do [this] due to the sacrifices they made so I could be able to do exactly whatever I wanted.”
Matias’s uncle introduced him to the world of interactive media. Matias would spend hours watching his uncle play Diablo II. This sparked a deep interest in gaming as a form of escapism for the would-be streamer. He was gifted his own gaming console, the Nintendo GameCube, before his 8th birthday.
Matias delved deeper into gaming during his adolescence, discovering the addictive fantasies of World of Warcraft, Mario Party, The Sims, Animal Crossing, and Super Smash Bros., among other gaming titles.
“It felt like it was a drug; I got a dose and just took off with it,” Matias said. “It was accessible and like my safety thing. It was the thing I could do on my own and not rely on other people to join me. I was an outcast as a young kid, so it was a form of escapism before I [blossomed].”
The Accidental Stream Star
Blossoming into a successful content creator with a dedicated, niche audience isn’t easy work. It took Matias years to find his true calling. He enrolled in an engineering program at university before dropping out after a semester. He switched to video game programming due to his latent interest in gaming, but the technical side of the field wasn’t quite where his passions lay.
“I would describe it as a series of missteps and mistakes that landed me where I was,” he laughed.
A colleague turned him on to content creation. Initially, Matias thought cultivating an online audience would give him a leg up in video game programming. Once he hit the live button, it became something else; it was love at first stream. During the first lockdown, the then part-time Matias found himself on temporary leave. The only fix for his boredom? Virtual reality.
Around this time, he became a reluctant full-time streamer, and a community slowly formed around Matias’ boisterous personality. That community would stagnate for nearly two years, however, causing him to reevaluate his place in the Twitch hierarchy.
Matias remains unsure exactly why his growth plateaued though the most likely culprit, he argued, was his lack of commitment. So, he gave himself an ultimatum: either discover a way to grow or find a “real job.”
That’s when he found a second life on TikTok. After shifting his gaming focus to the fantasy title Genshin Impact and releasing a slew of strategically-crafted TikToks, he discovered a new niche he was able to capitalize on. TikTok remains the streamer’s largest platform.
The formation of the affectionately nicknamed SipSipSquad of super fans was not far behind. It was a hard-fought battle, Matias said. But due to the deep desire to succeed his parents imparted on him, Matias was able to grow exponentially and become a full-time streamer. He bet it all and won.
“I was hyper-aware about the average Twitch audience. I had it in the back of my head that I would never be at the top level because the average viewer wouldn’t like me as this gay person,” he ended. “Going elsewhere and using those algorithms to find those people who get me was such a huge difference. It made me feel more comfortable being myself on screen. I kind of created my own little Twitch culture.”
