Apex Legends Twitch star Timmy ‘iitzTimmy’ An has reportedly turned down an offer to join esports giants TSM, with the streamer revealing that despite joining the organization being his “dream”, he’s “not sure” if he wants to join a team.
iitzTimmy has blown up on Twitch with the rise of Apex Legends, with the former Golden Guardians member going from hundreds of viewers to thousands across the last 12 months.
Helped along by his great talents, and shooting for remarkable challenges across Apex Legends and Valorant, Timmy is now a household name on Twitch.
However, he’s not going to follow in the footsteps of streamers like NiceWigg and Nokokopuffs and join an org like 100 Thieves or TSM though. In fact, Timmy is considering not taking up a TSM offer — despite it being his childhood dream to join the legendary organization.
“Do you want the truth? I have an offer from TSM. So then you’re going to be like ‘but wait Timmy, why don’t you join TSM?’ I have a lot of offers, chat, from a lot of orgs. It’s not like a flex or anything, but I’m not sure if I want to be in an org. It’s an honest opinion,” he said on December 5.
Timmy’s reasoning was simple: He wasn’t sure if organizations would give him enough money. With his stocks going up on the platform, sponsors are coming in, and the conflicts could see him lose out at the end of the day.
“I don’t want to say those reasons why on stream because that ruins the perspective of orgs in general, but as a content creator — especially someone as big as me — what can an org do for me? That’s the reason why you join an org.
“There has to be some beneficial value. That’s money, but the funny thing is orgs don’t really pay you that much. Some orgs don’t pay enough, their sponsors block what I want as sponsors.
“What if [a team] had a Razer or Corsair sponsorship, and I wanted a Logitech sponsor. That would be a conflict with the organization and myself, and I can’t get that sponsorship anymore. It goes with a lot of sponsors and that’s a big thing.”
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He also used Twitch star Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek as an example: “Shroud could really get any sponsor he realistically wanted, as long as he has good relationships with them. Those sponsors would probably pay shroud more money than the org would.”
The TSM offer was a bigger deal than most for Timmy. Having previously been signed to Golden Guardians, he had an idea of what it was like being in an organization. However, joining TSM was his dream, dating back to the “Baylife” League of Legends days.
“For me, personally, when I was younger and played a lot of League of Legends, I was a huge TSM fan. My dream was to be on TSM. As I became better and I wanted to become a better player, all the good players were on TSM.
“When I got my TSM offer, it wasn’t that the offer was bad, but I’d gotten to this point as a streamer where I felt like I didn’t need them. There’s that passion to join these orgs — TSM, NRG, Liquid, there’s so many of them — but why do I want to join them?”
The related segment begins at 9:35:34.
Despite all the talk about sponsors and money though, Timmy did set a price tag that he would sign for any org on the spot: “If someone is going to offer me a million dollars for a year to sign for an org right now, I’ll do it. I won’t need no f**king subs. You guys keep your five dollars.”