One of the most successful streamers on the sizable Twitch platform, Imane “Pokimane” Anys is a Moroccan-Canadian content creator who quickly rose to fame on Twitch playing titles like League of Legends and Fortnite. Known for her laid-back attitude and friendly demeanor, Pokimane has earned herself a highly impressive 8.2 million followers since her debut in 2013.
Pokimane has branched out into ventures other than video game streaming as well, hosting a separate lifestyle vlog and AMSR channel on YouTube and even appearing in the recent film Free Guy starring fellow Canadian Ryan Reynolds. But while the life of a Twitch streamer may seem like a dream come true for many gamers, it certainly comes with its own set of challenges.
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Streamers work long, constant hours to build their fan base and need to maintain those lengthy streams to satisfy their followers, or they risk losing them in the highly competitive field. Twitch “Hate Raids” have also been a prevalent problem for users too, with toxic members of the community flooding streams with hateful messages generated by bot accounts. As such, Pokimane has taken a break from streaming, citing issues with burnout.
Pokimane hasn’t been live on Twitch since August 22nd and has been staying with her parents in Canada. The Twitch star recently posted an update to her Twitter account saying that she is enjoying her time back home and will return to streaming on September 8th. Pokimane has spoken out about her burnout issues in the past and has even suggested that she may consider leaving Twitch entirely at some point in the future.
Between the aforementioned “hate raids” and the loss of popular streamer TimTheTatMan to YouTube, Twitch has been fighting through many issues of late. Recently streamers and users on the platform held a “Day off Twitch” movement, in which they boycotted the site for a day to try and bring awareness and protest Twitch’s treatment of its content creators.
Of course, Twitch has dealt with controversy before, but if it keeps hemorrhaging major talent like TimTheTatMan or burning out streamers still on the platform like Pokimane, Amazon’s massive streaming platform may yet have more rocky days to come. Still, other live-streaming services have tried to beat Twitch in the past and failed, like Microsoft’s own Mixer platform. Despite the problems, Twitch – and Pokimane – likely have plenty more streaming time ahead of them.
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Source: Dexerto