While marginalized creators boycott Twitch for a day, wealthy white guys keep marching to make a profit with their main competitor, YouTube. Earlier this week, it was Ben “DrLupo” Lupo. Today, com the #ADayOffTwitch campaign is in full swing, it’s Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar, who announced on Twitter which will be streamed exclusively on YouTube Gaming.
Betar, which has 7 million followers a Twitch, is one of the biggest stars of the streaming platform. Last August he made waves for being exceptionally dog shit Autumn boys, the royale pastel platforms. Despite repeated attempts, it took him eight days to win a match. At the height of the stream where he finally nailed a crown, more than 250,000 viewers tuned in simultaneously.
“It’s been great to see everything TimTheTatman has achieved since he joined Twitch in 2012, whether it’s marrying the love of his life and welcoming an heir to the Tatman throne, or the trials and tribulations of getting his first Autumn boys crown. It’s been a pleasure to be part of Tim’s community, and we’re proud of everything he’s done to play, ”a Twitch spokesman said. Kotaku in a statement.
Betar currently has 3.83 million subscribers on YouTube. Lupo, who first became famous for streaming Fortnite, will give up his 4.5 million Twitch followers. It currently has just under 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
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These guys are jumping from Twitch to YouTube for reasons as old as capitalism: time and money.
Said Wolf The Washington Post this week which, as a result of his deal with YouTube, is now “safe for life”. He also said the deal will give him more flexibility to spend time with his family. Meanwhile, Betar did not comment explicitly on specific funding, but pointed to an interview with Insider that streaming on YouTube will allow him, like Lupo, to spend more time with family.
Now, that doesn’t mean pointing the finger at Betar, Lupo, or anyone else who has jumped — or will jump — with the opportunity to work fewer hours to make more money. Real-time playback, despite paper appearances, is no easy task. It’s not just about “playing games for fun”. You’re on camera eight, nine, twelve hours a day. You are constantly activated. If you take a couple of hours off, your numbers will be a hit, which means your payroll too. In some cases, as with the popular streamer Oddball Streamer CodeMiko, you are doing a little act. The toll that influences all this pressure on the mental health of creators big and small is nothing to sneeze at. So you really can’t blame these individuals on an individual level.
But it is difficult not to point the finger at the institutional forces at play. This week, two white men with prominent followers on a major platform left that platform for another major platform, which presumably has greener pastures.
Meanwhile, Twitch continues to drop the ball when it comes to protecting its queer and color streamers.
Recently, hate incursions—Coordinated harassment campaigns have proliferated in which users massively flood a live broadcast, usually throwing insults, insults and derogatory comments. Because the bar to create a new Twitch account is lower than the one in the basement, users can easily return to any broadcast where they have been banned. On top of all that, Twitch takes what some streamers say is an unfair reduction in subscription revenue, splitting them down the center. (Streamers he said Kotaku a 70/30 division would be more reasonable.)
How The Washington Post detailed in an extensive report last month, these hate raids, mostly organized on Discord’s clandestine servers, only got worse. Therefore, creators they have since met, and I went off-platform today (no streaming, no viewing, no logging in) in an effort to urge Twitch to offer better protection tools.
But tomorrow they will return. They will have to do it. This is where the salary is.
At this time, it is unclear what impact #ADayOffTwitch will have on Twitch’s bottom line or whether it will drive the company to act. Contraction observer Zach Bussey posted on Twitter that while the numbers are preliminary, today there are about 5,000 fewer streamers and 500,000 fewer viewers than usual, not exactly the land. Still, the campaign is certainly the one driving the conversation. How Kotaku traitor Nathan Grayson pointed out, #ADayOffTwitch is a trend on Twitter with over 105,000 tweets, a split above YouTube Gaming, which is on trend but does so with much less steam. It is impossible to miss that moment.
I guess — and I honestly feel it took me so long to get to the damn point — I just wonder why Betar couldn’t have waited another day.