AuronPlay

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About

AuronPlay, real name Raúl Álvarez Genes, is a Spanish Twitch streamer and YouTuber. Over the course of his career, he amassed tens of millions of followers on YouTube and Twitch focusing mostly on gaming and react content. As of April 2022, he has earned the second-most Twitch followers behind Ninja.

History

Raúl Álvarez Genes was born November 5th, 1988, in Badalona, Spain. He joined YouTube as "AuronPlay" on February 28th, 2006.^[1] His earliest extant video was uploaded on October 21st, 2009, and has gained over 5.8 million views in nearly thirteen years (shown below).

Initially, Alvarez's content was focused on reacting to and criticizing other YouTubers' content,^[2] resulting in much of his early content getting removed due to copyright strikes. In 2013, he pivoted toward reacting to less-popular videos and doing movie and gameplay critiques. This helped his popularity grow on the platform, and he hit 1 million followers in 2015.

In 2019, Alvarez launched his Twitch channel auronplay, which soon became his main focus. There, he was able to amass over 12.5 million subscribers in three years,^[3] mostly streaming gaming-related content, and edits of his streams are uploaded to his secondary YouTube channel, Auron,^[4] which has gained over 13.2 million subscribers in three years. His original channel has gone dormant after amassing 29 million subscribers.^[1]

In 2020, he was named by Forbes Spain^[5] as one of Spain's top 100 influencers. El Salvador president Nayib Bukele jokingly named Alvarez the country's first "Minister of YouTube" in July 2019 on Twitter.^[6]

In April 2022, Dexerto^[11] argued that though Alvarez has fewer followers than Ninja and streams fewer hours than xQc, he could be considered the biggest streamer on the platform due to his high rate of growth and strong ratio of hours watched to hours streamed.

Controversies

Alvarez has attracted several controversies throughout his career. In 2015, while criticizing the Spanish program Gran Hermano VIP, he promoted the hashtag #GranHermanoVIH, "VIH" being the Spanish translation of "HIV," which was considered insensitive on social media and led to a retraction and hashtag change.^[7] In 2017, he joked about Barcelona football club president Josep Maria Bartomeu on social media, saying he looked like Nobita Nobi from Doraemon. Bartomeu filed a criminal complaint against Alvarez, but the complaint was dismissed.^[8]

Online Presence

In addition to his sizable presence on YouTube and Twitch, Alvarez also has amassed over 14.9 million followers on Twitter^[9] in nine years on the platform. He also has over 17.7 million followers on Instagram.^[10]

To date, AuronPlay's most viewed videos are "YOUTUBE'S MOST ANNOYING CHILD," which gained over 47 million views in four years (shown below, left), and "PRANK CALLING JORDI WILD," which gained over 37 million views in four years (shown below, right).