EnterMany of us in the Twitch and live streaming community work up the morning of Wednesday, October 6, 2021 with our social media applications blowing up our phone. 125GB of Twitch data was leaked to the public. While some people don't think 125GB is a lot because a single install of Call of Duty is about that, let me put it to you this way... That's roughly equivalent to 43.75 MILLION instant messages. This is not apps we're talking about, this is just plain text. So what does this mean for the streaming industry, and how does this affect you?
Twitch Data Leak and the Streaming Industry
With this topic there are a couple dynamics in play here. One is the fact that there is just a dump of all streamers payouts. So you now know how much prominent streamers such as Shroud, Ninja, CouRage, and many other streamers are getting paid. Sure, us normal people can gawk at that because many of us will never see that many commas in one of our payouts, but this is huge for companies like Facebook and Google who might want to recruit certain streamers to their platform. The streamer and the suitor now have the leverage over Twitch... or do they. some text...
To build on top of that, another part of the leak is supposedly an unreleased Steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios. With this information now in the wild and how much detail there is available on project Vapor, Steam now has an idea of things to look out for and how Vapor was going to set itself apart from Steam. Steam, depending on how good their developers are, can start heading some of that off and closing the gap on the differences before Twitch has a chance to release Vapor as a product.
What does the Twitch data leak mean for me?
As with any data breach, we have to ask how this affects us. And by us, I mean us small streamers who aren't going to be signing any multi-million exclusive streaming deals any time soon. What it boils down to, is it doesn't really affect you at all... I would highly suggest changing your password and setting up 2-factor authentication ASAP, but outside of that I don't think having your Twitch payouts out there is going to cause your viewership to increase or decrease. There is the potential that your actual name, address, email, and phone number might now be available, but many people have that on their social profiles anyways so, take it as you like. I know for me, just changing my password was enough for me to be like, ok sucks but nothing else changes for me.
