Asmongold says he suffered ‘panic attack’ over crucial Twitch decision

The streamer opened up about anxiety keeping him from streaming on his main channel.

asmongold-twitch-youtube
Screengrab via Asmongold on Twitch

The Asmongold Twitch channel hasn’t been live since July 15, but the channel’s dormant status doesn’t mean Asmongold himself has been inactive. 

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Instead of broadcasting to the channel that made him one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, he has opted for his alternate Twitch account “zackrawrr” nearly every day since July 28.

With exposure and viewership on his main channel being something he can leverage more than he can on his alternate channel, some of his viewers asked why he wasn’t streaming to his main channel for the WoW Wrath of the Lich King Classic release today.

Last week, Asmongold posted to Twitter saying he wasn’t sure if he would be on his main channel or alternate account, and today he confirmed he’d only be on the alternate channel for the expansion launch.

But it wasn’t his original intention. The MMO influencer says he drafted and scheduled a post to Twitter today saying he would be live on his main channel, but before he let it publish, he had what he referred to as a “weird personal thing.”

“I woke up at like seven in the morning, and I was having a panic attack and freaking out about it,” he said. “I couldn’t go back to sleep at all, and so I just said fuck it. I just gave up. I don’t know if I’m ever going to stream on my main channel again at this point.”

While streaming on one channel over another might not seem meaningful to some, the way Asmongold treats streams to his main channel are typically vastly different from how he operates on his alternate channel.

On the Asmongold channel, the king of MMOs is overly charismatic, and at times, he acts as a caricature of himself. On the other hand, his alternate channel is reserved for when he doesn’t want to do all of the theatrics involved in an “Asmongold” broadcast. On zackrawrr, the streamer tends to have a bit less energy, and instead of playing a character, he often just tells people his genuine unfiltered thoughts.

In the past year, Asmongold has dealt with numerous changes in his life, including most notably his mother’s death. Prior to her death, he lived with his mom in part to help care for her, and Asmongold has always shown excitement in telling fond stories about her.

Along with dealing with his personal mental health, Asmongold is also one of the founding members of the gaming organization One True King (OTK). In the past week, fellow streamer Trainwreck revealed one of the organization’s other co-owners, Mizkif, was potentially responsible for covering up sexual assault-related issues involving his roommate CrazySlick. 

Asmongold spoke out against the actions of Mizkif, who has since been put on leave from the organization. That doesn’t necessarily fix the strain it could have put on Asmongold’s mental health, however.

While Asmongold might be trying to keep things lowkey by streaming on zackrawrr, he isn’t exactly hiding from attention. At the time of writing this piece, zackrawrr has averaged 46,639 viewers across nearly eight hours of airtime today, according to Streams Charts, and the WoW Classic Wrath expansion just launched a couple of hours ago.

Author
Image of Max Miceli
Max Miceli
Senior Staff Writer. Max graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism and political science degree in 2015. He previously worked for The Esports Observer covering the streaming industry before joining Dot where he now helps with Overwatch 2 coverage.