xQc scores unbelievable $100 million deal to begin streaming on Kick

A New York Occasions report says Felix Lengyel, the streamer higher often known as xQc, has signed a take care of Twitch rival Kick price $70 million over two years, with incentives that might push the overall worth of the deal as much as $100 million in whole.

“Kick is permitting me to attempt to do issues I haven’t been capable of earlier than,” xQc mentioned. “I am extraordinarily excited to take this chance and maximize it into new inventive and contemporary concepts over coming years.”

xQc’s agent, Ryan Morrison, informed PC Gamer that he believes the streamer’s contract with Kick is “one of many high 25 expertise offers of all time interval, together with sports activities.”

What makes the deal much more astonishing is that it isn’t unique: xQc can proceed streaming on different platforms, and actually he nonetheless plans to take care of a presence on Twitch, though to not the extent that he has till now.

When it comes to viewers measurement, Kick is way smaller than Twitch, however it pays a a lot better charge: Where Twitch takes a 50% lower from most of its streamers (though it not too long ago adjusted that to 30% for a small quantity, with a number of restrictions), Kick takes solely 5%. It is also way more permissive about sure content material: Whereas Twitch has very tight tips on playing streams, Kick has a whole class devoted to it.

That should not be solely stunning: Kick co-founder and CEO Ed Craven can be the co-founder of Stake.com, a web based crypto-casino included in Curaçao. However in a perverse form of method, it is also a superb match for xQc, who has a reasonably well-known style for playing jones. In Could 2022 he admitted to dropping roughly $2 million on dangerous bets within the earlier month alone, though a couple of weeks later he mentioned he had no intention of adjusting his methods.

“I really like playing,” he mentioned throughout a stream. “I prefer to gamble, so I am simply going to gamble. Finish of story.”

Kick might look a bit sketchy—in December 2022, former Twitch director of inventive improvement Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham known as Kick “a sham”—however on the very least it appears severe about constructing a much bigger, extra mainstream viewers. It might not work out: Mixer paid a reported $50 million to pry Ninja away from Twitch, solely to announce a shutdown lower than a 12 months later, and it was backed by Microsoft cash. 

However for now, not less than, the deal is attracting consideration: Simply over an hour after saying his Kick presence, xQc’s verified channel on the platform already has greater than 50,000 followers.