The CS:GO streamer Nikolarn is successful on Twitch, but he is said to have paved his way to the top using unfair methods. A colleague accuses him of viewbotting.
Which streamer is it about? Nikolarn is one of the most watched CS:GO streamers on Twitch. In recent months he has consistently been in the top 10 in terms of hours watched. As of August 2023, he was ranked 7th worldwide (via sullygnome).
But the streamer’s success is said to have been cheated. At least that’s what content creator Dima Wallhacks accuses him of.
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Gambling sponsor and fake spectators
What are these accusations? In a video that Dima Wallhacks published on X/Twitter on September 11th, he takes a closer look at Nikolarn’s Twitch channel. The channel is sponsored by two CS gambling sites and the retailer G2A.
It shows that the streamer attracts an average of around 10,000 viewers. In the middle of the stream there seems to be suspicious increases: from 400 to 11,000 viewers in one fell swoop.
According to figures from the analysis site SullyGnome, he hardly gains any new followers per stream. While Nikolarn only gains new followers in the one or two-digit range per stream, the number for streamers with comparable viewer numbers is more in the three-digit range.
Dima Wallhacks also shows that Nikolarn’s chat is quite active, but relatively few chatters are also subscribers. He therefore accuses the streamer of so-called viewbotting in order to “make money”. We have embedded the whole video for you here:
Exposing a “10k average” CS:GO streamer pic.twitter.com/kQm6Z0HgAe
— dima_wallhacks (@dima_wallhacks) September 11, 2023
Viewbotting artificially inflates viewer numbers. This is a serious accusation because the practice violates Twitch’s guidelines. Anyone who gets caught risks losing their account forever (via Twitch).
After Dima Wallhacks published his allegations, other members of the CS community spoke out. Nikolarn is said to have been doing viewbotting for years: “He’s been doing it forever, as far as I know, everyone stopped caring about it at some point,” says Mrtweeday, a CS streamer with half a million subscribers.
Dima Wallhacks emphasizes that he doesn’t care if Nikolarn makes money with his methods. He sees the problem as being that Twitch rewards this behavior and he is shown as one of the first in the CS:GO category. This means more potential viewers will become aware of him and he could have an unfair advantage over honest streamers.
Nikolarn has not yet commented on the allegations.
For similar reasons, the channel “Fextralife” is a thorn in the side of many streamers: they accuse it of “legal viebotting”.
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