Two of the biggest Twitch stars in the world have announced that they’re taking a step back from streaming, with both Pokimane and Ninja making separate announcements.
Pokimane was the first to announce she was taking a break, originally announcing it back in July as she was moving. The streamer, who has 9.2 million followers on Twitch, recently returned with a YouTube video explaining the break, and what’s next. Pokimane says that Twitch isn’t “creatively fulfilling” for her anymore and that streaming all day was simply getting in the way of her daily life. “When I wake up nowadays, I don’t want to run to my PC and game for eight hours straight,” says Pokimane.
The streamer will still be using Twitch, but won’t have a set schedule or planned streaming. At the same time, she’ll be utilizing other social media like TikTok and Instagram for alternative content. Pokimane explains this choice by saying,
“There’s such a pressure on streamers to follow every trend, to capitalize on viewership, to stream longer than the guy next to them. It’s just a hyper-competitive industry. But ultimately, the reason I say this is because I’m just at a point in my life that it doesn’t feel creatively fulfilling to feed into that anymore.”
It’s clear that being a full-time streamer takes a toll, as Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has also announced he’s taking a break, for an unspecified amount of time. Ninja is currently the biggest streamer in the world with 18.3 million followers, and today the streamer tweeted “I need a break… I don’t know when I will be back, or where.”
Directly after that Ninja deleted his social media presence, but a couple of days ago the streamer tweeted he was “feeling super under the weather.” This isn’t the first time Ninja has left Twitch, as he switched to Mixer back in 2019, but ended up back on Twitch after Microsoft’s streaming platform went under.
This time around, however, it seems like Ninja is taking a complete break from making content, and we’ll just have to wait and see how long that lasts, or what form his content will take whenever he does come back. Back in February, Ninja’s manager and wife, Jessica Blevins, announced she was stepping down from her role.
