One Of Twitch's Biggest Streamers Signed A $70 Million Deal With A Rival Platform

On the internet, business that involves content creators, centers on the individuals who created the content.

Felix Lengyel, is a streamer better known as xQc. He made a name for himself when he became one of Twitch's top streamers. But following issues involving Twitch, Felix signed a deal with Kick, a rival of Twitch.

It's reported that the deal is worth a staggering $70 million over two years, with incentives that could push the total value of the deal up to $100 million in total.

According to Felix:

For more than many years, Twitch was the dominant streaming platform. While there were other places to stream, Twitch was one that would actively support its creators via partnership deals and contracts that allowed them to generate large amounts of money.

However, when it revised how it would pay its creators, many people who worked hard to create content on the platform were angered by Twitch's decision to take a massive 50% cut.

As Twitch begun to make even more controversial changes, more and more creators have fled to competing sites.

While Twitch later readjusted the cut to 30% for a small number of streamers, with several restrictions, many streamers were still annoyed.

In comparison, Kick, the viral platform, is a lot smaller than Twitch, in terms of audience size.

However, Kick only takes 5% cut.

What's more, it's also much more permissive about certain content.

While Twitch has very tight guidelines on gambling streams, Kick has an entire category dedicated to it.

This happens because Kick's co-founder and CEO, Ed Craven, is also the co-founder of Stake.com, an online cryptocurrency-casino.

In one way or another, this is a fit to xQc, who admitted to have lost roughly $2 million on bad bets.

"I love gambling," he said during one of his streams. "I like to gamble, so I'm just going to gamble. End of story."

xQc’s agent, Ryan Morrison, said that he believes the streamer’s contract with Kick is “one of the top 25 talent deals of all time period, including sports.”

What makes the deal even more of an advantage for xQc is that, it's not exclusive: xQc is allowed to continue streaming on other platforms, including on Twitch.

An hour after announcing his Kick presence, xQc's verified channel on the platform already has more than 50,000 followers.

The deal however, was met with quite a lot of questions.

With the deal worth a potential $100 million, which is a number equivalent to the paycheck received by world-class athlete LeBron James' in his two-year Los Angeles Lakers extension, some started wondering how Kick as a small company can even afford this.

Ed Craven, the company's chief executive, knows this too, but noted that the company is willing to take the chance, and operate at a loss as a startup.

A week after signing a deal, having xQc on board is proven a good idea.

This is because soon after xQc signed the massive deal, some of Twitch's top streamers and beyond started becoming less optimistic about Twitch’s future.

One of them, is Mizkif.

The Twitch and YouTube streamer whose real name is Matthew Rinaudo, said that "Twitch is done."

But xQc's presence is also more than a handful.

After inking a deal that is considered one of the biggest deals made by online content creators, xQc is playing fast and loose with Kick's policy.

For starters, he watched Christopher Nolan's 2008 The Dark Knight while on livestream, which makes the stream violate DMCA policy. Kick asked him to stop doing this, but days later, he is seen streaming episodes of AMC's hit crime drama Breaking Bad.

DMCA, or the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act, is a 1998 law that serves as the basis for modern U.S. copyright law.

The law protects platforms like Kick from liability if users upload copyrighted material. However, it also requires Kick to cooperate with takedown requests from the copyright holder.

Therefore, many online platforms, Kick included, disallow users from uploading or streaming copyrighted material.

At first, xQc complied with Kick's request regarding copyrighted content, and immediately stopping his Dark Knight stream after receiving a message from Kick's staff. However, he repeated doing the same thing, because the former Twitch streamer said that his main reason to move to Kick is because it lets him engage in activities he couldn't on the other platform.

However, Kick still has rules and moderation, and regardless of one's personal opinion on copyright laws, Kick is beginning to see the issue of hosting a big star on its platform.