xQc Claims Overwatch League Hid Low Viewership with Bots

The player explained that an unnamed insider from the MLG testing days showed him the unfiltered viewership data. He let the source be anonymous, but admitted seeing those real numbers, which was a huge wake-up call for him.

At the time, xQc was signed with the Dallas Fuel. But knowing the true audience size completely changed his mind about his career. The league had very strict rules that banned players from streaming on their personal Twitch channels while official matches were live.

Sacrificing his own brand growth for a league with artificial hype didn’t sit right with him. He realized that giving up his personal streams for what he described as a bot-boosted audience wasn’t worth it.

That harsh truth ultimately pushed him to leave esports and go full-time into content creation.

The Reality of “Legal Viewbotting” in Esports

A lot of it wasn’t due to hackers using software, but was instead described as “legal viewbotting.”

The livestream was embedded in the Battle.net launcher. So, whenever anyone opened the app to play a game, it automatically counted as a viewer.

Blizzard reportedly incentivized players to keep the stream open by handing out OWL tokens and exclusive in-game skins. Thousands of people were said to have gone AFK overnight just to farm the tokens.

Former top streamer on Twitch, Ludwig Ahgren, has also criticized the esports industry for these artificially inflated metrics on his YouTube channel. He previously pointed out how organizations rely on these artificial viewership numbers to pitch high engagement benefitting the platforms and creators alike.