You know how expensive it is to hire people to do commentary for a corporate event? Air travel, lodging, and food for a day or two. Then there’s the “crew” in charge of streaming equipment, which could be just 1 guy, but it’s stressful as all heck. Look up Spooky from the FGC, especially in his early days.

Then there’s taxes, insurance forms, and various other paper work for being a contractor for a corporate event. Then there’s scouting the venue, getting permission to use their Wi-Fi, electrical outlets, etc. Spooky once had to stream using his 4G back in the day when his internet was down mid-stream. On top of that, you have to set up a separate table for “streaming” and request the judges to give the players extra time if they’re on camera.

All for what? To promote a game, live on air; where you risk a player say something utterly offensive, stupid or something that would damage the community, much less the brand? With worlds or big events, you don’t necessarily have to worry about that, but with random people during pools; what happens if a player does something against Twitch’s TOS? Some power trip hungry mod would just cut the feed and poof, the streaming account is suspended and thousands of dollars wasted. You just pissed off the corporate folks hiring you for a supposedly simple job of streaming.

Wizards of the Coast (MTG) used to have a contracted crew (GGLive) that used to go around PTQs and small events and stream them live in early 2010s. WOTC would eventually stop supporting these folks, citing the lack of audience (views) could not justify the cost of paying 2-3 people to commentate/stream for 2 days straight. That’s with just a skeleton crew of people compared to what a SCG event used to have back in the day, mind you.

To sum it up, the number of eyes watching any regular/normal event does not justify the cost to stream. If the prize pool was in the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you can bet the marketing team will hire the best qualified people to stream and commentate said event. A couple boxes of product and maybe a Nintendo Switch? Not worth risking thousands of dollars on some contractors with a few hundred eyes watching the stream, four digits tops during top 8, sans big prizes.