Published , by Sam Chandler
Published , by Sam Chandler
Félix “xQc” Lengyel has been suspended from Twitch after he cheated during Twitch’s GlitchCon Fall Guys tournament. This suspension will see xQc unable to utilize his account, banned from future Twitch Rivals competitions for six months, and forfeit any prize money he may have won.
UPDATED: (11/18/20 - 7:30 p.m. PT / 10:30 p.m. ET): GrandPooBear has just announced via Twitter that he has also been banned from Twitch Rivals for 6 months. The reason for this being that he was involved in the cheating. Like xQc, GrandPooBear will lose what prize money they made from the tournament.
Reported on by Engadget on November 18, 2020, Twitch made the decision to temporarily suspend xQc’s Twitch account after the company determined he had “stream sniped”. For those not down with the lingo, stream sniping refers to watching a competitor's stream in order to work out where they are in order to gain an upper hand.
It would seem xQc is no stranger to being banned from the platform. Dot Esports points out that the streamer, who pulls in tens of thousands of views, has been banned a few times in the past. The reasons for these other bans were for watching “sexually suggestive videos”.
Popular streamers and Twitch bans seem to go hand-in-hand. It was only back in September that Leafy was permanently banned from the platform. Prior to that, Dr. Disrespect received a permanent ban for currently unknown reasons. There’s an entire laundry list of streamers doing the wrong thing and then getting slapped with a suspension or worse.
But Twitch itself has also found itself in some hot water recently thanks to a myriad of DMCA issues. It would seem that playing music you do not own the rights to in your stream results in copyright holders asking you to not do that. Twitch’s remedy for this was to have users delete clips and VODs that had copyright strikes and ask them to use rights-cleared music libraries.
Streaming is an inherently difficult task. Streamers are there to perform, both at a functional level in-game but also as a personality. Unfortunately, some streamers seem to forget about ethics, morals, and the terms of service while they’re making great plays.