Ludwig calls out Fextralife for “stealing views” on Twitch

Returning from time away at Sh**camp 2021, Ludwig went live on his Twitch channel to catch up with his community. While talking about New World, he said there’s something fishy about the Fextralife community channel view count and the embedded streams on their site. 

With over 860,000 followers on Twitch, Fextralife is a gaming community and news source with a focus on Action, Adventure, and RPGs.

Alongside the stream channel, the community offers hundreds of game wikis following the same genre of games to help players figure out things they need to progress or just simply learn about.

After talking about Twitch’s newest stream-boost feature announcement and how it “helps the rich become richer,” Ludwig changed the topic over to how bigger streamers are withholding viewers. Doing so, he realized something he thought was rather fishy about the stream from Fextralife.

Twitch, Ludwig

Ludwig showed stream that Fextralife has the second channel under the category for New World.

Ludwig calls out Fextralife

After checking out Fextralife’s stream, Ludwig realized – at that moment – they had been live for over 24 hours with almost 60k viewers, but did not have very many viewers actually chatting.

While explaining this to his chat, he used the ‘/chatters’ command on the communities channel to reveal that they have just over half of their view count active in chat.

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After Ludwig went back to his channel to run the same command, he showed that even though he had half the viewers, his engagement was much higher.

Ludwig goes on to explain his thought process behind Fextralife having so many viewers, claiming they are “stealing views” with embedded streams on their game wikis.

Whether or not that is accurate is unknown.

Using the Google search example of “dark souls guide,” he shows that the second result on search is the relevant wiki. On every page of the communities wiki, there is an embed of their channel in the top left corner.

“I don’t know if it’s illegal and I don’t know if it’s against TOS, but it’s not a good thing for Twitch,” Ludwig explained. “I’m just saying it’s eating up every New World viewer because they’re going to Fextralife instead of smaller streamers who provide pretty entertaining content.”

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Twitch does have a section on its help page dedicated to fake engagement but it’s unknown if any of those rules would apply in this unique situation.