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Streaming platform Twitch: Long ago more than just a portal for gaming recordings
Photo: SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Twitch is familiar with live situations.
This Wednesday, however, things will be hectic behind the scenes at the Amazon subsidiary, which is focused on live broadcasts.
Because suddenly it is no longer just the creators of the platform who are in the spotlight, but also those who provide them with the technical environment for their appearances.
In the network there are increasing reports about a leak of allegedly around 125 gigabytes of data connected to the video platform.
And it could only be the first of several publications, at least that's how the text accompanying the leak sounds in a web forum.
Twitch's community is a “poisonous cesspool”, wrote someone unknown to a download link for the data package.
The leak should be understood as a targeted disruption and an attempt to promote competition in the streaming market.
It contains the entire source code of Twitch.tv and other Twitch offers as well as all creator income from August 2019 to today - allegedly also information that is part of Twitch's trade secrets.
Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, once paid $ 970 million for Twitch, is joked at the end: "We'll give it to you for free."
Are the data real?
Twitch itself has not yet commented on the leak.
The magazine "Video Games Chronicle" reports, however, that a source from the company had signaled to him that the data was probably real.
And the German tech magazine “Heise” also confirms that at least the data about his own Twitch account that appears in the leak is correct.
The operator of the gaming channel »tehMorag« announces on Twitter that the information about payments to him corresponds to reality.
According to individual Twitter users, the data reveals, among other things, how much money Twitch has paid out its streamers in the past two years, including the top stars. The package of presumed internal information should also contain evidence that Twitch has been working on an alternative to the much-used PC gaming platform Steam under the project name Vapor.
Twitch is one of the most important video platforms in the world, and it became famous for gaming recordings that were commented on live by video players.
Meanwhile, Twitch is much more than just a portal for game streams.
There are, for example, sports and concert broadcasts, as well as cooking shows or bizarre things such as streams mostly by women who chat in front of the camera in whirlpools or swimming pools and collect donations from their predominantly male viewers.
Million revenue via Twitch
The most successful Twitch streamers from Germany include MontanaBlack (for whom you can read a portrait here) and Knossi (whose career is described here).
Both of them could be assumed to be among the broader circle of Twitch's top earners based on their popularity and subscription numbers alone.
This assessment would be supported by the numbers now circulating from the leak, according to which both streamers received more than two million dollars each from August 2019 through September 2021.
When classifying such sums, one should also bear in mind that such payments must first be taxed in Germany.
At the same time, most creators are not only active on Twitch, but also generate additional income via other platforms, via merchandising and sponsorship deals.
Twitch has not yet responded to a request from SPIEGEL about the leak and the consequences for German users and creators.
We will update this article as soon as an incident statement is received.