The CEO of Twitch is apparently planning measures against the Twitch channel Fextralife. They dominated the release of games like Diablo 4, but also had many viewers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, Elden Ring, Lost Ark, and Cyberpunk.
Where does the information come from?
- The statement comes from streamer KingGothalion. He says he received an email from Twitch boss Dan Clancy.
- Clancy spoke with streamer CohhCarnage, who represents the community. It was concluded that actions would be taken against channels that abuse the autoplay feature on Twitch. The CEO asked KingGothalion for a list of the channels that abuse the feature the worst.
- He named Fextralife.
Diablo 4 was a huge release for Twitch this year:
Channel accused of playing Twitch via autoplay
What are they doing so wrong? Fextralife operates a series of wikis for current games and a Twitch channel.
On their wiki pages, Fextralife’s Twitch channel is embedded and runs on autoplay.
So if someone is looking for information on Diablo 4 or Baldur’s Gate 3, they might end up on one of Fextralife’s wiki pages, automatically see the Fextralife channel, and count as a live viewer of their Twitch channel.
Channel supposedly generates “artificial viewbots”
And what is the problem with that? This has been criticized by some streamers who feel they are being overlooked for top spots in viewer rankings: Because during the release of games, Fextralife repeatedly appeared as the channel with the most viewers or the highest watch time.
The top positions in such statistics are prestigious, because often real viewers watch the channel that has the most viewers on Twitch. The statistics could also influence advertising deals.
It probably also simply hurts the pride and sense of justice of some streamers when a “company” ranks above them.
It is said that this “embedding” method leads Fextralife to generate “viewbots” that do not actually watch the channel but count as viewers.
The behavior of Fextralife was criticized as early as 2022: It is particularly noticeable in games that require many guides, such as Lost Ark and Elden Ring.
Are they really that big? In the last 180 days, the viewer hours for Diablo 4 were distributed as follows:
- Fextralife 19.343 million hours
- Quinn69 8.303 million hours
- shroud: 7.637 million hours
- wudijo 7.158 million hours
Fextralife is thus bigger than shroud and quin69 combined.
The behavior was already criticized in 2021:
Twitch plans “quick and dirty solution”
What does the Twitch CEO supposedly say? He says: They want to solve the problem simply and want to disable autoplay on certain websites. That would be a “quick, dirty solution.” Afterwards, they could consider a long-term plan.
How is this being discussed? On reddit people are discussing this with some schadenfreude. It is said that “Fextralife” is surely sweating now. The channel is accused of having outdated or low-quality wikis that are only created in such large numbers to push their Twitch channel.
Also in Germany, a channel benefited from autoplay at the release of Diablo 3:
Twitch: Diablo is blasting past us to number 1 – In the USA, cheating is happening again
The title image shows Yuria, a streamer from Fextralife.
