While most Twitch streamers celebrated their impressive 2020 channel recap numbers, Félix ‘xQc’ Lengyel had a different take and shared how the figures presented in his recap from last year are actually fake.
On January 15, Twitch announced the release of their 2020 channel recaps. After a stressful year, the platform wanted to celebrate its many channels by showing off statistics like how many viewers, followers, and hours of watch time each streamer had in the past year.
Twitter was quickly flooded with tweets from creators showing off their impressive numbers; in a time where the world consumed more video game content than ever before, some streamers boasted viewership numbers reaching into the tens of millions.
While most streamers praised the move by Twitch to release this information and enjoyed sharing it with their communities, one of the platform’s biggest stars, xQc, had a different outlook.
Pulling up his 2020 stats on-screen, xQc remarked “Unique viewership . . . 35 mil,” while also pointing out that he’d clocked nearly 140 million hours of watch-time in 2020.
After looking at his numbers, the streamer questioned how Twitch came up with the 35 million number: “So they’re like, unique individuals?”
“There’s a lot of bots in there, 100 percent. There’s a crazy amount of bots probably in there. This is not even real dude. This is all fake.”
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The streamer pointed out how a wave of bots in 2020 – over 3 million – threw off his numbers. The botting issues from last year made it impossible for him to know how many of those numbers are real people or fake accounts.
“All these moments are ruined by ‘Botter Andys’, that’s so stupid.”
Bots or not, there’s no doubting that xQc was the face of Twitch – or streaming in general, for that matter – in 2020.
The Luminosity Gaming star had the most hours watched out of any channel on any platform, nearly 20 million more than the second-highest, Brazilian streamer Gaules.