Twitch’s greatest streamer, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, is signing with the corporate’s latest rival, Kick, a streaming platform that provides higher income splits and in addition seems to be centered round on-line playing. The non-exclusive deal is valued at as much as $100 million over two years, and is the newest and largest blow to Twitch as creator discontent continues to mount.
As first reported by The New York Instances, the settlement can pay out $35 million per 12 months, with $30 million in further incentives obtainable if xQc hits sure benchmarks. As Dexerto points out, this is able to make it the twelfth greatest annual payout in all of sports activities, placing xQc proper forward of Kevin Durant.
Kick is a streaming platform startup funded by on-line playing corporations together with Easygo Gaming and Stake.com. Following Twitch’s crackdown on playing promotion final fall, the platform attracted massive names like Adin Ross, BruceDropEmOff, and Trainwreckstv with its lax guidelines and 5/95 income cut up for creators. It’s not but clear if Kick is worthwhile or the way it plans to change into so, however it has managed to profit from a backlash towards Twitch because the Amazon-owned platform has sought to extra aggressively monetize the folks making content material for it.
A “youngster of Twitch” raised in its often-toxic chat, xQc began on the earth of League of Legends earlier than transferring on to Overwatch, briefly competing in Blizzard’s Overwatch League earlier than ultimately being launched from the Dallas Gasoline after a sequence of suspensions for offensive feedback. He pivoted to being a full-time content material creator in 2018, with this mixture of high-level play, unfiltered remarks, and an countless penchant for controversy turning him into Twitch’s most-watched streamer by 2021.
By 2022, leaks revealed that xQc had earned $8 million from subscriptions on the platform. That very same 12 months, he misplaced $1.8 million in a single month from on-line playing. Whereas his contract with Kick doesn’t preclude him from streaming on Twitch, the latter has a rule towards simulcasting, making it unclear how a lot time, if any, xQc will nonetheless dedicate to the platform that helped flip him right into a star within the first place.
“It’s time,” xQc tweeted on June 16, when his new partnership with Kick was introduced. The submit included a video promising his content material would stay unchanged on the brand new platform. Straight beneath that was a retweet displaying help for streamer Nickmercs, who’d just lately come underneath hearth for making anti-LGBTQ+ remarks.
