By Kemar Noel
Over the summer in mid-June famous Twitch streamer, Felix Lengyel, also known as “XQC,” signed a $100 million non-exclusive streaming contract with the controversial streaming service Kick.
Lengyel is a Canadian streamer, content creator and former professional Overwatch esports player. He started his streaming career eight years ago and has continued to climb the ladder on Twitch since then. Lengyel has nearly 12 million followers on Twitch and is now one of the top 0.1% percent of Twitch earners.
Lengyel has been a part of the top echelon of Twitch streamers for years and has amassed a massive online presence in not only the Twitch space but also YouTube.
Kick is a newer live-streaming service backed by the gambling company Stake. This has led Kick to have a somewhat rocky start, and it was failing to see the growth the company needed. The conclusion they came to was to sign over influencers to stream on their site whether it be exclusive or non-exclusive deals.
In a livestream, Lengyel spoke about why a non-exclusive deal was a big positive for him when considering signing.
“I really, really enjoy that it is not exclusive overall so that I can go around and do whatever I want and diversify, just kind of wing it. I think it’s a massive deal at the same time. There’s this other thing that I want to do also and that’s just kind-of how it goes.” Lengyel said.
Kick was able to catapult itself into the spotlight with the deal; overnight Kick became the main talk of many news outlets like “The New York Times” and “Forbes.”
Many of the top 0.1 percenters can earn millions on Twitch and can cement themselves on the top with loyal viewers by broadcasting their content. Even with this solid influx of money and financial stability for top earners, there have still been a number of them to have left Twitch in the past few years for other sites like Facebook, YouTube, and now, Kick.
This is not the first multi-million-dollar contract made in the streaming space, but it is one of the only paid contracts to publicly surpass the $20 million contract Tyler Blevins “ninja” had a couple of years ago.
This is one of the highest-paid contracts in the entertainment industry and is no doubt a deal most people would not pass on.
“Kick is allowing me to try and do things I haven’t been able to before,” Lengyel said in a statement.
Even if the streamer is planning to make new events and content on this site, there are still some daunting factors to consider. The matters were made worse when it was brought to light back in October 2021 how much Twitch streamers were really making, which led people to call Lengyel greedy.
Lengyel now faces backlash for being a sellout and signing to a platform that promotes gambling, and other unethical behavior.
Path of Exile streamer “Mathil” said it is a major deal when someone signs a contract initially.
“If someone has no money and they get 100 mil, yeah, sure, that’s big …” Mathil said. “But if someone’s got probably 100 mil already, gets another 100 mil, what have you done? Nothing. You’ve sold your audience out for another few zeroes, and it is absolutely selling your audience out. The whole gambling sponsorship here, the whole gambling slots thing, it’s disgusting.”
Kick has some issues regarding site security, moderation, and hate speech. Until they attempt to fix these issues any future streamers who sign to this site will face some sort of pushback from their respective communities.