Elgato has put in serious research and legwork in order to provide gamers and content creators with the tools they need to grow their audiences. If you’re thinking about starting up a let’s play channel or a streaming channel of your own — I mean seriously considering it — then you likely already have a wishlist of tools you’ll need.
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A capture card and microphone are your bare necessities, and Elgato has an entire line of beginner friendly capture cards that I have loved over the years. A tool no less useful that comes across as more intimidating to beginners is a macro keyboard. They can be big, they can look like spaceship command panels, and they can be difficult to program effectively. Elgato’s new Stream Deck Mini fits in the palm of your hand, and offers professional-grade command over your stream for 99 bucks.
Here’s the elevator pitch and basic breakdown from Elgato:
Six Fully-Customizable LCD Keys:
- One-touch tactile operation. Instant visual feedback.
Drag and Drop Setup:
- Simply drag and drop actions onto keys. Assign ready-made icons or create original images.
Native Integrations:
- OBS Studio, XSplit, Streamlabs, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Mixer, and more – Stream Deck Mini seamlessly integrates into a creator’s favorite tools and platforms.
Creativity Unleashed:
- Creators can use Stream Deck Mini to enhance their on-screen antics with GIFs, images, videos, and soundbites.
Multitasking Made Easy:
- Assign several actions to a single key and launch them all with a tap. One by one separated by intervals, or together, simultaneously.
If you’re a vet streamer, then you probably own the original Stream Deck or some other namebrand macro keyboard. I own and love my Stream Deck, and the mini provides the exact same functionality. For the uninitiated, why bother? Setting up for a stream, initiating a stream, and maintaining a stream while engaging with your viewers can be hard work, and the Stream Deck Mini is all about streamlining that process from beginning to end, freeing you up for what’s most important: the game you’re playing, and your fans.
Consider this: When you want to kick off your Fortnite stream, you probably have a laundry list of actions to perform before you get going. After you start the game, you’ll need to go live in your client of choice, tweet out the link to all of your followers so they know to join you, and probably type up and offer a short greeting to everyone in the Twitch chat with some links for donations or a call to subscribe.
Instead of taking five minutes of your time to do all of that, what if you could tap a single button and get on with it? With the push of a single, beautiful, custom LCD-backlit key with a glowing image of a Fortnite pinata, you could go live and send out all of those links and greetings instantly.
What about toxic viewers in Twitch chat, something every streamer professional or amateur has to deal with on a regular basis. Let’s say you have a few people crashing your stream who begin talking trash or abusing your regular audience in the chat. Your game is heating up, and you don’t have the money to pay moderators, so you either have to take your attention away from the game to ban or mute a handful of jerks, or else let them abuse your subscribers.
With the Stream Deck Mini, you could have an entire button devoted to Twitch commands. Tap that bad boy, and it could open up a sup-folder of functions, and one of those keys could automatically switch the Twitch chat to subscribers-only chat. Two key presses that you can execute in about 1.5 seconds, and the problem is dealt with.
Some of the functions are more practical, and you don’t need to be livestreaming to use your Stream Deck Mini. If you want to start making game review videos and uploading them to YouTube, or to a website you’ve created, the Stream Deck Mini will integrate seamlessly into your Elgato Game Capture software or OBS. Assign keys to start and stop capturing so don’t have to keep taking gameplay breaks to go back to your computer and click around.
Apart from its function, which is absolutely the most important part of this device as a tool, it’s also incredibly fun to customize. Sure, you can label your Twitch folder button with a giant Twitch logo, and you can put the Twitter logo on the button you push to send out your “going live” notifications, but you don’t have to. We’re only dealing with six buttons, here, and you set them up yourself. You’ll know exactly what each button does, and muscle memory will serve you better than your eyes do, so go crazy and deck out your Stream Deck Mini with beautiful, beautiful buttons!
If you’re into Adventure Time, create your own custom layout with your favorite characters. Fill an entire key folder with custom Twitch emotes, one for each button. The Stream Deck software makes it incredible easy to assign icons and functions to every single key, and for budding streamers as well as professionals, the only limit is your imagination.
When you hold the thing in your hand, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s small, light, and plastic. When you take it out of the box, it may not feel like a $100 product, and that’s my only real complaint. My original Stream Deck has also accrued a few visible scuffs and scratches on a few of the buttons, so you need to be careful with this thing. But you’re not paying for precious metals or expensive materials. You’re paying for a compact, extremely potent creative tool with an accompanying suite of software and extended functionality.
For content creators, the Stream Deck Mini is a massive quality of life upgrade that you won’t be able to live without after integrating it into your routine. This is one of the most versatile tools you could possibly add to your arsenal as a streamer, and it’s one of the most affordable macro keyboards on the market.
You can check out available sellers here.
