Twitch’s biggest streamer, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, has signed with the company’s newest competitor, Kick, a streaming platform that offers better revenue sharing and also appears to have a focus on online gambling. Valued at up to $100 million over two years, the non-exclusive deal is the latest and biggest blow to Twitch as creator dissatisfaction continues to mount.
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As the New York Times first reported, the agreement will pay out $35 million per year, with $30 million in additional incentives available if xQc meets certain benchmarks. As Dexerto points this outThat would make it the 12th-highest annual payout in all esports, placing xQc just ahead of Kevin Durant.
Kick is a streaming platform startup funded by online gambling companies such as Easygo Gaming and Stake.com. Following Twitch’s crackdown on gambling advertising last fall, the platform attracted big names like Adin Ross, BruceDropEmOff, and Trainwreckstv with its lax rules and 5/95 revenue split for developers. It’s not yet clear if Kick is profitable or how it intends to be, but it could benefit from a backlash against Twitch as the Amazon-owned platform has tried to more aggressively monetize the people who create content for it.
A “kid of Twitch” raised in his often toxic chat, xQc got his start in the world of League of Legends before moving to Overwatch and briefly competing in Blizzard’s Overwatch League before finally falling after a series of suspensions Offensive from the Dallas Fuel was released Comments. In 2018 he switched to full-time content creation. With that mix of high-quality play, unfiltered remarks, and an endless penchant for controversy, he became Twitch’s most-watched streamer of 2021.
By 2022, leaks revealed that xQc had earned 8 million dollars from subscriptions on the platform. In the same year, he lost $1.8 million from online gambling in a single month. While his contract with Kick doesn’t prevent him from streaming on Twitch, the latter has a rule against simulcasting, making it unclear how much time, if any, xQc will still devote to the platform that helped bring him to the star to make place.
“It’s time”, xQc tweeted on June 16 when his new partnership with Kick was announced. The post included a video promising that its content would remain unchanged on the new platform. Just below was a retweet expressing support for streamer Nickmercs, which has recently come under fire for anti-LGBTQ+ comments.