Pokimane Leaving Twitch

Overview

Pokimane Leaving Twitch, also known as Pokimane Twitch Retirement Rumors, refers to content creator and Twitch streamer Pokimane announcing her departure from the livestreaming website in late January 2024. This announcement, speculated by some fans to be coming over the past two years, caused a reverberation within the streaming community with various reactions and memes taking place shortly after. As of January 31st, 2024, it is unknown exactly what Pokimane is planning to do or why she chose to leave Twitch given her cryptic tweet, however, numerous unfounded theories circulated online over the following days as people speculated that she might be moving to YouTube or Kick, doing multi-platform streaming or quitting streaming altogether.

Background

In the past, Pokimane had announced lessening her streaming on Twitch, instead wanting to focus on other projects such as Instagram and TikTok. On September 2nd, 2022, TikToker nolaggaming^[1] uploaded Pokimane's original video about her reducing her Twitch streams while commentating and summarizing it, earning over 5,800 likes in two years (shown below).

January 2024 Announcement Tweet

On January 30th, 2024, Pokimane perceivably announced the end of her Twitch livestreaming with a post on her official X^[2] / Twitter account. In the post, Pokimane showed how she was the face of the app with her image being used in the iPhone App Store promotional image for Twitch, stating that it was "the end of an era," and earning over 3.2 million views in four hours (shown below).

Online Reactions

The reactions to her retirement were instant, with many of her fellow Twitch streamers chiming in on her status to post heartfelt messages to her. Other streamers, however, began speculating about the announcement and its many responses.

For example, on January 30th, 2024, streamer Cinna^[3] noticed that the wording of the reply from Twitch, as well as Pokimane's contract purportedly being up soon with the company, meant that Pokimane might return to streaming later and isn't fully quitting (reupload shown below).

Cinna's clip was also reposted to the /r/LivestreamFail^[5] subreddit that day, receiving over 440 upvotes and 330 comments in 21 hours. Among the top-voted comments speculating about Pokimane's vague tweet, Redditors theorized that it could mean she was planning to multistream, switch to YouTube or was merely baiting engagement for an upcoming announcement.^[5]

On the /r/h3h3productions^[6] subreddit on January 30th, a post stating that Pokimane "quit streaming" roughly a week after YouTuber and podcaster Jeff Wittek expressed interest toward her on the H3 Podcast garnered over 1,200 upvotes and 170 comments in 19 hours, with the top-voted comment also theorizing that she was moving to YouTube.

Notable streamers such as Hasan Piker and xQc also reacted to the announcement on their streams on January 30th, 2024 (seen below, left and right).

Some also reacted indifferently or negatively to Pokimane's news as it continued to spread online, expressing their takes via memes or other reactions. For example, on January 30th, 2024, TikToker mendy_yer^[4] uploaded her retirement message while showing that her Tier 3 subs would be crying but the majority of people would not care about her, a sentiment shared in various posts about Pokimane's retirement (shown below).

The streaming platform Kick notably posted a reaction GIF to Pokimane's tweet on January 30th, replying with a scene of a man slyly smirking.^[7] Later that night, Kick then posted an image of Pokimane's Myna Snacks cookies on its X account with a similar style to its announcement of xQc joining its platform in July 2023.^[9] The post, which received over 1.2 million views and 7,300 likes in 15 hours, sparked additional discourse about Pokimane potentially streaming on its platform, but it is likely the company was trolling her due to past statements she made about Kick.^[10]

Pokimane Speaks Out

On January 31st, 2024, Pokimane was talking on her podcast don't tell anyone with pokimane when she brought up what she considers her primary reason for leaving Twitch. On the podcast, Pokimane explains that within Twitch and livestreaming culture, there has been a steady shift towards being more Red Pill type of behavior, not explicitly mentioning Andrew Tate but referencing his influence in the past years. On February 6th, 2024, the streamer Asmongold played^[11] the clip of her saying that before going into a rant on how Twitch is far less into that culture than YouTube, where Pokimane currently streams (shown below).

Search Interest

External References