Original: Twitch Rival Kick In XFL Territory 5 Months After Its Initial Launch
Content creators call foul. Five months into its launch, Twitch rival Kick now appears to be moving into XFL territory with a slew of streamer complaints about moderation policies, safety, and favoritism.
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About Twitch rival Kick
Kick was launched last December and is reportedly owned by Stake.com. On March 28, 2023, Kick named Hikaru Nakamura, a famous chess professional and gamer, as General Manager of the company. The live streaming platform has similar functionality to Twitch but has promised more robust compensation and monetization options for streamers, with several popular creators like Trainwreck, Buddha, Chica, and Sodapoppin boosting Kick’s notoriety early on.
However, a handful of creators have begun to report bugs and policy issues with the service (which is so new it still doesn’t have a Wikipedia page).
Now, fans are hoping Nakamura can help set the sails at Kick before it gets anchored with the type of quality control issues that plagued the XFL in the early 2000s.
Streamers question safety at Kick
According to some streamers, Twitch rival Kick has taken the relaxed policies too far and created an unsafe environment for both content creators and viewers. For example, last Thursday LtKanada posted a screenshot of a racist username on Kick, now “following” him.
The complaints are reminiscent of calls for more player safety in the XFL in its early days. For example, XFL’s “scramble” rule, designed to style the league as a tougher version of the NFL, put a player from each team five yards away from the ball and required them to run toward it to fight for possession. The rule created a chaotic and dangerous exchange between players as they collided at high speeds and was ultimately abandoned after it was deemed unsafe. In the first XFL game, in fact, a player injured himself on the opening scramble and was out for the rest of the season.
The Vince McMahon-funded venture would go on to scrap more rules due to safety issues as the season played out.
Viewership
Streamers have also complained that Kick uses bots to inflate viewership artificially. Over the weekend, GameRant reported a conversation with CodyRiffs, known for his music and tutorials online, who expressed frustration with the streamer and left the company with “a bad taste in his mouth” after finding out the numbers were inflated artificially with bots.
Similarly, the XFL, facing mounting losses in viewership from its opening game (58 million) to its final (2 million), looked for ways to boost interest in the sport artificially by incorporating content that became increasingly inappropriate, irritating viewers and TV personalities along the way.
Check out this trip to the cheerleaders’ locker room as ratings imploded for the league in its first season.
Snatching usernames for bigger streamers
There have also been reports that Kick pulled usernames from existing accounts to give to bigger and more popular streamers. One creator took her grievances to social media.
If true, Kick has likely concluded that streamers with a more robust fanbase offer a higher ROI and are counting on viewers to migrate with their favorite content creators.
The XFL also relied on household names to build hype and leveraged their acquisitions of popular personalities to promote engagement with the audience. Speaking at the opening game, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin suggested he would open up a can of whoop-ass on then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to energize the crowd.
“I heard the guy who runs the NFL, Paul Tagliabue, said that the XFL is a non-issue,” Stone Cold said, “A non-issue? Hell, I think that’s an insult to football fans everywhere, and an insult to the men knocking heads on the football field. You know Mr. Tagliabue… you might be careful. That ‘non-issue’ just might bite you on your ass. And that’s the bottom line, ’cause Stone Cold said so.”
Ultimately, though, the big names couldn’t save the doomed league.
Final words
We’re bullish on Twitch rival Kick in the long term, but we can’t help but wonder how difficult a task Nakamura faces as he tries to get the streamer back on track. Is Kick going too far with its positioning? Are they cutting corners to catch up with Twitch? Who knows?
However, there may be lessons from history Kick can draw from if they want to put a real dent in Twitch’s audience, which is sure to be no mean feat as the streamer’s viewership grows larger than all of Disney Plus.
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