Games and streaming are a combination like no other for a generation like no other. Broadcasting yourself while playing your favorite video game or simply sharing bits of your daily life on camera has not only become a lucrative business, but it’s also part of the mainstream now.
There’s the fun stuff, there’s the normal stuff, and there are some controversies and drama as well. When it comes to ranking the biggest streamers on Twitch, it boils down to looking at the stats.
Get your popcorn ready, because we’re gonna be looking at the top 10 biggest Twitch streamers right now. Let’s go!
10
Sodapoppin (8,797,000+ followers)
Starting all the way back in 2011, Sodapoppin slowly raised his profile over the years through his involvement in several eSports organisations. However, what gave him the biggest boost was the explosion of popularity that Among Us experienced in 2020. He was one of the first streamers to find the game, and many credit him with sparking the game’s popularity.
9
Pokimane (9,224,000+ followers)
Imane Anys, better known as Pokimane, is this list’s queen, standing atop the female streaming population. As much as she is a professional streamer now, at one time, Pokimane was in university and was studying chemical engineering.
She got up to 450,000 followers in 2017 and earned the Best Twitch Streamer of the year at the Shorty Awards due to the way she played and commented during her League of Legends streams. In fact, they boosted her popularity times fold — she even got a cameo when the Clash game mode was launched.
After that, she rode the Fortnite wave, took part in multiple collaborations and events, and attracted a large audience through her interaction with the infamous Twitch chat and streaming of various content on the platform. Nowadays, her streams can begin with a chat session, continue with some gaming, and extend into a full cooking show.
Oh, she also co-founded OfflineTV where she is in a house with other streamers and they create new content together. And she also got her clothing brand together with Markiplier and Jacksepticeye — it’s called Cloak.
In August 2022, Pokimane announced that she would be taking an extended break for her mental health, giving no indication of when she would be back, yet despite that her channel is still in the top ten.
8
TheGrefg (10,091,000+ followers)
Now, if you can only guess where David Martinez is from — that’s right, he’s from Spain too! His interest in games sparked around the time most of us got into games — during childhood. Martinez decided to take a step further and in early 2012, at just 14, he began uploading his videos to YouTube.
Little did he know that just eight years later, he would be the sixth top influencer in Spain, according to Forbes, and even be on the magazine’s cover a few months later. TheGrefg’s very own skin in Fortnite is there alongside other streamers’ but far from that being his only achievement — he has released three books and three songs, was nominated for the Game Awards Content Creator of the Year, and even broke a Guinness record for a live stream with over 2,468,668 simultaneous viewers.
As colorful and happy as TheGrefg’s career sounds, it has a dark side that is often forgotten. In 2020, TheGrefg promoted a product called iAirpods, which were supposedly Apple AirPods, for — drumrolls, please — free. The catch? It was 10 euro for the shipping. This rip-off “deal” caused public outcry, but despite that, he is still streaming to millions of faithful followers.
7
Shroud (10,266,000+ followers)
Michael Grzesiek has a Polish-sounding name because he is half Polish and half Canadian. Going strong through CS:GO esports, he left Cloud9 in 2018 and smashed Twitch’s metrics. In just a day after reaching 100,000 subs, he got another 14,000.
He thought he had Twitch all for himself when the number one streamer left for Microsoft’s Mixer, but he didn’t know what offer was waiting for him. We still don’t know either, but the point is he moved too. Too bad it shut down, but not for shroud, though, because he partnered with Facebook Gaming after getting an even better offer he couldn’t refuse.
In the very end, though, Twitch won the fight over him, and now he streams there exclusively, with more than half a million concurrent viewers on his first stream in a long while. Now he streams all kinds of variety content, with a focus on popular FPS titles.
6
xQc (11,075,000+ followers)
Félix Lengyel is the French-Canadian streamer you will see online most of the time. The roots of this controversial personality lie in one of the most toxic games ever — League of Legends, but it actually didn’t last as long as some may think (not then, at least).
He switched to Overwatch and played for several teams for a year until deciding to do only streaming. That didn’t last as long, and xQc got into esports once again, winning the 2017 Overwatch World Cup’s title of most valuable player despite losing the tournament to the champs.
After some ups and downs with his very last team, Gladiators Legion, xQc just threw it all and put everything he had into streaming. Now he’s live an average of nine hours a day and he streams more or less anything — from viewer-suggested games to his latest craze that is GTA 5, and previously — Valorant, where he streamed around 113 hours in eight days, with three streams over 20 hours.
So yeah, you can say he’s very much into it. Not without some controversies though. He got his account suspended several times — to name a few, one time while playing Overwatch for reporting players he’s tilted at for random reasons like not switching a hero after playing like a noob and dying; another time was because he threw a match-fixed game, and a third time was because of being toxic in, you guessed it, League of Legends…
He also got fined a few thousand bucks by the Overwatch League and was banned on Twitch at least four times for showing some X-rated stuff, and what-not. Overall, a fun guy.
5
Tfue (11,151,000+ followers)
Turner Tenney, the FaZe Clan pro who’s been in a lot of trouble for a lot of things, and still has over 11 million followers on Twitch and almost 12 million subs on YouTube. It all happened when he was streaming Call of Duty, Destiny, and H1Z1, but one day, he decided to turn to Fortnite, and as a result, his channel exploded.
Now that’s a graphic sequence we won’t cue, so let’s look at his style — funny, with top-notch scoped rifle skills. Then again, he was also allegedly selling and buying Epic Games accounts, which got him a nice, fat ban.
Too bad that he became most famous for his lawsuit against FaZe Clan, where he filed against the organization for a manipulative contract where only 20 percent of the profit got to Tfue’s pocket from all the Twitch and YouTube revenue as well as any additional sponsorships.
After the dust settled, though, Tfue went independent and is now streaming to an average of 25,000 people every time he comes on live to play mostly Warzone or other famous battle royales and from time to time some other titles too.
4
Ibai (11,372,000+ followers)
Ibai is the first of a lineup of Spanish streamers you might not have heard of. Ibai Llanos, as is his full name, is a long-time League of Legends tournament caster whose reach expanded well beyond Riot’s MOBA as he became an icon among Twitch’s Hispanic audience.
Ibai went through several media ventures where he left his mark as a charismatic host and commentator, including League of Legends tournaments, the late-night show Hoy no se sale, and an exclusive content creation contract for G2 Esports.
He graduated those with flying colors and decided to give his all to Twitch where he has been streaming since 2014. He now has several top events behind him with multiple charity collabs, owns a streaming brand, and even has a special series on his channel where he hosts talks with pros from different fields, including soccer players Ronaldinho and Sergio Ramos, singer Nicki Nicole, and more. If you’re into Spanish, this is your opportunity to practice through some listening.
3
Rubius (12,543,000+ followers)
Rubén Gundersen is most likely another unknown name for many, but this Spanish-Norwegian guy has amassed a massive 40 million follower base on YouTube with nearly one fourth of that on Twitch. With 3D modeling and animation uni studies complete, the previously blond-haired kid dove into content creation and figured out how YouTube’s algorithms work before transitioning to Twitch for more raw content.
You gotta try until you make it work, and that’s what Rubius did — he pushed out a plethora of content, despite his main topic being gaming. Vlogs, challenges, fan FAQs, and sketch comedies are just a portion of what he’s done. He even broke the record for most concurrent viewers on a Fortnite stream with 1.1 million people watching him at one point.
Aside from online content creation, though, Rubius has published a book — interactive and full of challenges. To boast even further, he’s also published a comic book in three parts and got a documentary made about his life. Even better, later, on the same channel where his documentary was released — Movistar+, an anime adaptation of his comic book was put up as well. Now that’s the way to become a true weeaboo!
2
AuronPlay (13,427,000+ followers)
Here comes the biggest Spanish Twitch channel and it belongs to Raúl Genes. He is the bronze on Twitch and on YouTube as well, or at least in Spain, with 29.2 million subscribers. But before all of this, he was just a guy — and one who worked at a printing shop for the better part of a decade.
Do you know the comedian in the group who always wants to make everyone laugh even if it’s at pointless jokes? Well, that’s auronplay. He always begins his videos with the same phrase that has become iconic amongst his audience and while he’s shown some controversial behavior on several occasions, he’s been on the low-end for the most part. Aside from that one time when FC Barcelona’s president Josep Bartomeu almost sued him for too many and too brutal tweets.
Anyway, having been featured on Forbes Spain and GQ Spain, auronplay has been called all kinds of beautiful names, but perhaps the best one of all comes from the president of El Salvador who called him the country’s “minister of YouTube” by “presidential decree”. Now that’s a title worth mentioning when you introduce yourself!
1
Ninja (18,303,000+followers)
Ladies and gentlemen, the king of Twitch — Richard Tyler Blevins. Sitting at over 18 million on Twitch and almost 24 million on YT, it’s no wonder that the Ninja brand is recognized almost universally amongst the younger crowd.
Coming down from the Chicago suburbs, Ninja got gud in Halo 3 and that’s what paved the way to today’s esports for him. He’s been playing ever since despite his heavy streaming schedule and the number of titles he’s played while streaming is perhaps the biggest from all the bunch here. That’s Ninja we’re talking about, though, so, of course, the first one to come to mind is Fortnite, not Final Fantasy XI, right?
That’s right. After completely pulverizing Twitch records, playing Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster, getting his own event where he gave money to those who could beat him, receiving exclusive streaming deals from platforms and games, being featured in numerous shows and articles, fundraising millions of dollars, and getting into some of the most controversial situations ever, Ninja just decided to take it easy and play what he wants. And, as pretty much said by the man himself, he’s never been happier.
Written by Plamena Katsarova and Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
