I’ve been meaning to get a PC setup to improve my streaming, and I’m also considering developing my own game, but I have limited experience with PCs and don’t currently own one. Does anyone know of a good laptop or desktop I can buy that’s good for both streaming and development? Also, how much does it matter if I get a laptop vs a desktop?

If a desktop and laptop have the same specs, the desktop will be cheaper. In general a desktop is also possible/much easier to upgrade in the future. The laptop of course has the benefit of portability.

Build Guides - PCPartPicker You don't have to buy the most recent parts like these guides are suggesting. But even if you go off-build, the Builder tool is super useful to determine compatibility between parts.

Building your own PC used to be cheaper, but nowadays with the price of GPUs it might sometimes make more sense to go for prebuilts instead. But first, see if you can buy secondhand - I got a PC with an RTX 1070 and a VR headset for a 60-70% markdown compared to retail price because they were looking to offload their units and recoup some costs. Likewise, someone who is upgrading their rig might be more willing to sell their old hardware for a lower price.

You won't get the top of the line and the newest shiny this way, but you will most likely get a very decent rig - and a 1070 or higher can get you VERY far for most indie game development purposes. Hell, if you're doing 2D game dev, then even a normal laptop iGPU will be more than enough most of the time.

I want to second this here and mention there's a great silver lining to developing on older hardware: it forces you to keep your game optimized so it at least runs OK on most computers, and runs buttery smooth on newer ones.

Of course if you're diligent you can always be monitoring how long it actually takes to render a frame in your game so you can notice when something you've added has a big cost even if it's still running smoothly on your high end machine.