The streaming platform Twitch has sent its streamers their viewer numbers for 2020 and proudly shared the reactions on Twitter. However, the biggest streamer of 2020, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, says: His numbers are fake. Bots were included and they ruined every statistic.
This is how Twitch celebrates its streamers: Last week, Twitch sent countless emails to its streamers with the “Twitch Recap.” In this summary, the streamers can see among other things:
- How many hours their streams were viewed
- How many unique followers they have gained
- How many hours the streamers were live
Additionally, the Twitch Recap revealed some information about the streamers’ most popular categories and the used emotes.
Twitch invited the streamers on Twitter to share their numbers and reactions. They celebrated themselves and their community once again.
The message was clear: Whether big or small. We love you all. You are all important and make Twitch what it is.
xQc believes: Numbers are ruined by bots
This is how the biggest streamer reacts: The most successful streamer of 2020 was Felix “xQc” Lengyel. The Canadian was ranked 1st with 147.8 million viewed hours, ahead of Gaules and Summit1g (viaginx.tv).
xQc is like “the new generation” of Twitch. He has embraced every major hype, is live for long periods, and offers his viewers an entertaining program:
- He constantly interacts with the chat
- tries numerous games, no matter how silly they may seem
- plays the perpetual villain in Rust
- or gets banned because he cannot resist pressing buttons.
xQc, however, does not join the hype around Twitch’s numbers. He looks at his numbers and sees allegedly almost 36 million “unique viewers”.
He says:
“There are 100% bots involved. There is an insane number of bots involved.”
Even with the 5.3 million unique followers, xQc says: There is a wave of bots that somehow granted him 3 million followers. He cannot take all these numbers seriously:
This is all fake. All these seemingly great moments are ruined by bot randys. This is so silly.
xQc gains 3 million followers in 10 hours – Probably bots at work
Here’s what’s behind it: In fact, one cannot always trust the statistics from Twitch. Some days, completely irrelevant channels suddenly gain thousands of new followers and appear to trend. Even the popular xQc suddenly sees such huge follower jumps that they can only be explained by bots.
So xQc allegedly gained nearly 3 million new followers in a single Twitch stream on December 30th. He has therefore gained more followers in 10 hours than in the rest of 2020 combined.
Even the second-largest streamer in the world, Gaules, is only so high in the statistics because his channel runs practically around the clock. The Brazilian CS:GO expert is known for running recordings when he is not live. This leads to Gaules streaming a total of 8400 hours in 2020 – an average of 23 hours a day. This also distorts the statistics.
In April 2020, the weaknesses of the “Twitch” system became fully apparent when Valorant raffled beta access through Twitch Drops. Here, it became clear that “live streaming platform” is not taken too seriously:
Drops, eBay, bots and beta keys – How Valorant leads to problems on Twitch
