The streamer Nikolarn has found success on CS:GO (Steam) on Twitch, but he is said to have paved his way to the top using unscrupulous methods. A colleague accuses him of viewbotting.
Which streamer is being talked about? Nikolarn is one of the most viewed streamers on CS:GO on Twitch. In the last months, he has consistently been in the top 10 based on hours watched. In August 2023, he was ranked 7th worldwide (via sullygnome).
However, the success of the streamer is said to be cheated. This is what the content creator Dima Wallhacks accuses him of.
CS:GO experienced a huge boost in the spring with the announcement of Counter-Strike 2.
Gambling sponsor and false viewers
What are these allegations about? In a video that Dima Wallhacks released on September 11 on X/Twitter, he closely examines Nikolarn’s Twitch channel. The channel is sponsored by 2 CS gambling sites as well as the retailer G2A.
He shows that the streamer attracts an average of about 10,000 viewers. In the middle of the stream, there seem to be suspicious spikes: from 400 to 11,000 viewers in one go.
According to numbers from the analysis site SullyGnome, he gains hardly any new followers per stream. While Nikolarn only gains new followers in the single or double digits per stream, the numbers for streamers with comparable viewer counts are usually in the triple digits.
Dima Wallhacks also shows that while Nikolarn’s chat is quite active, relatively few chatters are subscribers. He thus accuses the streamer of so-called viewbotting to “cash in”. We have embedded the entire video here:
Exposing a "10k average" CS:GO Streamer pic.twitter.com/kQm6Z0HgAe
— dima_wallhacks (@dima_wallhacks) September 11, 2023
In viewbotting, the viewer numbers are artificially inflated. This is a serious accusation, as the practice violates Twitch’s guidelines. Those caught risk losing their account forever (via Twitch).
After Dima Wallhacks published his allegations, other members of the CS community spoke out. Nikolarn is said to have been viewbotting for years: “He has been doing this for ages, as far as I know, everyone eventually stopped caring about it,” says Mrtweeday, a CS streamer with half a million subscribers.
Dima Wallhacks emphasizes that he doesn’t care if Nikolarn makes money with his methods. The problem, he sees, is that Twitch rewards this behavior and he appears as one of the first in the CS:GO category. As a result, more potential viewers become aware of him and he could have an unfair advantage over honest streamers.
Nikolarn has not yet commented on the allegations.
For similar reasons, the channel “Fextralife” is also a thorn in the side of many streamers: They accuse him of “legal viewbotting”.
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