Faker breaks Twitch streaming record

Faker now holds the record for most concurrent viewers on an individual player's stream, as SKT officially move over to Twitch.

Photo via Riot Games

It should come as no surprise that Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok broke a major Twitch record during his first day using the streaming service. I mean, he is the best player in League of Legends history, after all. Marking League team SKT T1’s official arrival on Twitch, Faker amassed 245,100 concurrent viewers, setting the record for an individual streamer’s channel. He joined SKT T1 top laner Geo “Huni” Seung-hoon, jungler Han “Peanut” Wang-ho, AD carry Bae “Bang” Jun-sik, and support Lee “Wolf” Jae-wan in the team’s move from former streaming service Azubu. “We believe Twitch to be the ideal platform to showcase our T1 players’ skills,” Sun Jung Kim, esports division director at SKT, said in a statement. “SKT T1’s global content business partner KongDoo Company will also be planning to share global content in the future.” Faker stuck mostly to speaking Korean, though an English translator was on hand to help English language viewers. It’s unclear whether Faker’s stream will continue in this fashion, or if the translator was a one time deal for the player’s first day. We’ve reached out to Twitch for clarification. Though his stream was plagued by a few technical issues, things evened out as the hours passed by. A round of PogChamps there, shall we? And as expected, despite the stream problems, Faker’s debut dwarfed fellow League streamer Imaqtpie, who was streaming at the same time. (For reference, qtpie has just over 38,000 viewers at the time of publishing—after Faker stopped streaming.) It looks like being bumped down a slot in Twitch numbers is something other League streamers are just going to have to get used to.

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Nicole Carpenter
Nicole Carpenter is a reporter for Dot Esports. She lives in Massachusetts with her cat, Puppy, and dog, Major. She's a Zenyatta main who'd rather be playing D.Va.