-- refresher on the guidelines - Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well stated -- it's impressive that a 1 hour old account thoroughly understands the guidelines this much. :)

>you don't get that nominal value unless you hit concurrent viewer count, and everything is calibrated such that it's basically impossible to get the advertised bag of money

This may be a bit of an overstatement on your part, especially the "They can make one tenth that if they're lucky" part. Bounties cap out at 10,000 viewers and are prorated as a % of average viewers, for a streamer with 4,000 average views hitting 10,000 is perfectly reasonable. As for "shilling for some crappy mobile game", the majority of games with bounties are fairly large ones, Fortnite and Genshin Impact were the two provided from the leaked bounty board and are by no means "crappy mobile games". The majority of games on bounty boards are from large game studios (2019 leak - League of Legends, Core, Sekiro:Shadows Die Twice; 2020 leak - Rocket Arena, Core)

I wouldn't say I'm offering any "grand theories", I'm only providing information on a live-streaming platform with 76% market share in America(this is what I mean by dominant)