Twitch

Different Millionaire Fights Refrigerator

Sometimes, you just decide that you’ve gotta fix something, and you’re not going to rest until you’ve won a battle of wits and wills against a piece of plastic. Most of the time, though, you don’t have 80,000 people watching you do it. Today, Twitch star Ludwig Ahgren, trapped in the purgatorial “final” hour of…

Millionaire Forgets To Pay Electric Bill

Today, the top streamer on Twitch was forced to quit mid-stream because, he says, he forgot to pay his power bill. He is a millionaire. You hate to see it. These days, Félix “xQc” Lengyel is notably more mature than the guy who got booted from an Overwatch League team in 2018 after a string…

Twitch Stop Sign Stream Temporarily Stops After Address Leaks, Neighbors Receive Pizzas

This week on Twitch, a stop sign became a saga. Stopsigncam, a 24/7 stream of a single intersection in Salem, Massachusetts where drivers regularly blow through a stop with no concern for their lives or others, blew up thanks to a viral TikTok. But at the peak of its popularity, it went offline. Since Wednesday…

Twitch Streamer Behind ‘Never-Ending’ Marathon Says He’ll Only Make A Fraction Of $470,000 Haul [UPDATE]

For the past week and a half, Twitch star Ludwig Ahgren has been on the clock. Whether asleep, awake, or drowsily somewhere between, Ahgren has kept his stream running to fulfill the terms of a “subathon” where every subscription adds ten seconds to a timer. So far, he’s pulled in nearly $500,000. He says, however,…

Twitch’s Latest Sensation Is A Stop Sign Where No One Stops

A blue car pulls up to a stop sign. Against all odds, it briefly, miraculously comes to a halt. Twitch chat goes ballistic. Numerous people spam “I was here” as pogchamp emotes flood in. This is Stopsigncam, a Twitch channel that suddenly has over 125,000 followers even though it’s just a camera trained on a…

Livestream Of Boulder Mass Shooting Raises Questions About What YouTube And Twitch Should Allow

Yesterday, a shooter opened fire at the King Soopers store in Boulder, Colorado and killed 10 people. Not long after the attack, a streamer, Dean Schiller, arrived on the scene and broadcast to an audience that topped out at nearly 30,000 concurrent viewers. The resulting video has been viewed over 650,000 times. Despite the visible…

Twitch Streamer Gross Gore Banned After Years Of Sexual Assault Allegations

Today, Twitch banned and de-partnered Ali “Gross Gore” Larsen, a longtime streamer and subject of controversy, after sexual assault allegations old and new came to light last weekend. Allegations emerged after the 28 year-old Larsen, who’s been suspended by Twitch numerous times over the years, made a post on the RoastMe subreddit on Friday. This…

Twitch Star’s ‘Never-Ending’ Stream Shows No Signs Of Stopping, Despite Need To Eat, Sleep

Ludwig Ahgren, a Twitch streamer with nearly 2 million followers, has never been one to shy away from stunts. His latest is especially audacious, albeit probably not great for his long-term health: He’s running a “never-ending” marathon stream powered by subscriptions. Each subscription adds another 10 seconds to the total amount of time he’s required…

Twitch Streamer Banned Twice In Two Days For Harassing Himself, Somehow

It might be an understatement to say that popular Minecraft YouTuber and streamer George “GeorgeNotFound’’ Davidson had a weird weekend. Within two days, he got banned from Twitch, possibly un-banned, definitely banned again, and unbanned (again?). Why? “Harassment via username,” according to Twitch. Problem is, the only person he could have possibly been harassing was…

A Twitch Streamer Unearthed Cards From A Fake ’90s Pokémon Ripoff, And Fans Are Pretending The Series Was Real All Along [UPDATE]

There’s elaborate performance art, and then there’s what renowned Twitch jester Jerma did over the weekend. In a truly inspired stream, he parodied the recent Pokémon booster pack craze by going out into the Nevada desert and pretending to excavate a chest seemingly full of unopened Pokémon cards from 1997. They turned out to be…

CodeMiko Is The Future Of Streaming, Unless Twitch Bans Her First

CodeMiko is nervous. I can tell because she tells me. “This is, like, my first interview ever,” she says over a Discord call. “I’m sorry, I’m a little shy.” It’s December of 2020, and Miko’s entire life is about to change. Miko does not know it yet. She is, after all, not a fortune teller,…

Twitch’s First Transparency Report Is A Start, But Streamers Want More

Today, Twitch released its first-ever transparency report, a lengthy, stat-based look at the platform’s safety initiatives over the past year. It contains some interesting, albeit granular, information about Twitch’s efforts to cut down on hateful conduct, sexual harassment, and even terrorist propaganda. But it also fails to clear the haze from the question that has…

Twitch Star Quits GTA RP After In-Game Jobs Become Too Much Like Real Jobs

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life? It’s the chicken or egg question for the modern age, but after a certain point, the answer ceases to matter. That point, it turns out, is when you’re really fucking sick of doing real jobs inside a video game, as Twitch mainstay Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris can…

Twitch Removes Amazon’s Anti-Union Ads After Furious Streamer Response

Earlier this week, it came to light that Twitch was running ads in blatant opposition to the Amazon warehouse worker unionization effort in Bessemer, Alabama. Streamers, who had no say in whether or not these ads appeared during their broadcasts, were outraged. Today, Twitch has removed the ads, saying that they never should have run…

Twitch Viewers Elect Meme Lizard As New Permanent Pogchamp

Today, Twitch let viewers vote on a new permanent Pogchamp emote. A lizard won. Frankly, it was inevitable. KomodoHype first got to be Pogchamp for a day last month as part of the intermittently disastrous Pogchamp-a-day promotion that brought us to this point, which Twitch decided to run after the original face of the popular…

Twitch’s not-so-grand Pogchamp experiment is coming to an end. After replacing the conspiracy-addled face of the popular emote with 35 different Pogchamps in 35 days, Twitch seems to be on the brink of a more permanent arrangement. Tomorrow, viewers will be able to “decide what the future of hype looks like” as part of a…

Creators On Twitch, Instagram, And TikTok Will Soon Gain Benefits From A Major Hollywood Union

Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, and TikTokers just got a potentially very powerful ally: The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, aka SAG-AFTRA, one of the most powerful unions in Hollywood. Soon, influencers who create branded content will be able to qualify for union benefits. Speaking to Backstage, a SAG-AFTRA rep explained that…

Grand Theft Auto Role-Playing Is Big On Twitch Again, Starring, Uh, Johnny Silverhand From Cyberpunk

The scene: Grand Theft Auto V’s iconic city of Los Santos. People mill about outside an apartment building, likely plotting crimes. Nothing seems out of the ordinary—except for a lone figure. Clad in suffocatingly tight leather pants and a bulletproof vest, he looks prepared for anything and nothing all at once. He also looks like…

For The Streamer From The Last Of Us Bunny Meme, Virality Led To Death Threats Over Things She Never Did

If Emme “Negaoryx” Montgomery’s chat moderator hadn’t gotten up to use the bathroom, six million people would not have seen what happened next. During a stream last week, a viewer asked Montgomery, “What color is your thong today?” Usually, Montgomery doesn’t acknowledge those sorts of messages. But with her mod gone, the message did not…

Twitch Embeds Keep Getting Worse

In the past couple months, the experience of watching Twitch via third-party sites or tools like MultiTwitch has become… fraught. A purple screen sometimes obscures whatever you’re watching. It implores you to tune in on Twitch dot television instead. Eventually, it disappears. Then, every 15 minutes or so, it comes back. As of a couple…