Streamlabs is being called out for plagiarism of Lightstream’s product by Pokimane, Hasan, OBS and Elgato.
Streamlabs has grown to be one of the biggest live-streaming experts with their software and tools to support streamers. However, there are other software and hardware companies, along with big streamers, Pokimane and Hasan, who noticed some flagrant copy issues of the streaming company’s latest project to another company’s project.
The streaming service company recently announced the release of Streamlabs Studio, which will be a new web-based broadcasting studio—partnered with Twitch—specifically tailored for better customization of Xbox Live streams. It is fine for the streaming giant to create software similar to others, but the website for Streamlabs Studio is clearly a copy of Lightstream’s Lightstream Studio—and no one is happy about it. CEO and co-founder of Lightstream, Stu Grubbs, caught on and noticed that the user experience and everything about it is almost an exact copy of their work.
Evidently, there is a similar layout and similar wording for each part—the various sections of information even follow the same order. A Twitch streamer and former Lightstream employee, Brandon “iamBrandon” Stennis even brought up that the reviews section on Streamlabs Studio was taken from Lightstream Studio’s review as the words were copied verbatim—they just changed the product to theirs and changed the names of the reviewers.
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is another streaming software that shared their experiences with Streamlabs and how they experienced copy issues with them. Apparently, OBS asked the streaming competitor to not use the OBS name, but they ended up “filing a trademark” so they could use the name regardless.
Elgato’s response in the matter was more of a meme or joke fired at the streaming software, which hinted that the Streamlabs Deck mobile application was almost identical to Elgato’s Stream Deck product. It seems like Streamlabs has been fuelling some bad blood with many of its competitors and has even forced the hands of streamers who use their product. Pokimane tweeted, “Streamlabs better resolve this entire thread of issues, or I’ll be asking them to take my face off the platform + look to use another donation service,” in response to the OBS tweet. Another streamer, Hasan, pretty much said the same thing.
Streamlabs responded to the initial tweet from Lightstream tweet about the copy and said: “We made a mistake. Text on the landing page was placeholder text that went into production by error. This is our fault. We removed the text as soon as we found out. Our intended version is now live. Lightstream team is great and we’ve reached out directly to them to apologize.” With all the word and image changes, and almost the same layout of text information, they do not make a compelling argument that the situation is a mistake.
Update: November 17, 2021
Streamlabs has just released a statement on Twitter that shows the company taking responsibility for their actions with OBS, but does not mention anything regarding Lightstream, Elgato or the streamers threatening to part ways with the service.
