Subathons have become a popular activity for many streamers on Twitch. They all follow the same general format of a streamer going live, setting up a clock, and adding more time with every new sub they gain. That means people need to subscribe so they keep streaming. Subathons are a great way for streamers to gain more subscribers, but they can also be “quite unhealthy,” as Pokimane pointed out when she weighed in on the popular trend on March 23.
After watching a bit of a controversial clip of Sykkuno sharing his opinions of subathons, Pokimane said: “Because Sykkuno had the courage to speak his opinion I will do the same. I am always a little iffy about subathons, for a myriad of reasons.”
Pokimane continued on to say she understands there are “tactics some people could consider a little like unethical where you’re kind of pretending you’re streaming, but really you’re sleeping and doing other things and just pretending to do a subathon in a sense
“But if people are okay with that,” she added, “and still like being in the chat and whatever then there’s no real issue in a way cause people are paying for what they get.”
However, although Pokimane does not think there is anything inherently wrong with Twitch subathons, especially ones that are closely moderated, she does believe they sometimes go “too far” and can be unhealthy for streamers to do for lengthy periods of time.
“The other reason is like there is no way subathons are healthy for a human to do,” the Twitch streamer said. “And the fact we are incentivizing it with hundreds of thousands of dollars, major clout, followers, attention, we’re like ‘oh my god this person has been streaming three weeks, poggers! Poggers!’ It’s like, no, they need to see a doctor.”
One person in her Twitch chat said, “That’s the point, suffer for my pleasure,” to which Pokimane responded, “I think a little bit of that is ok but the line kind of needs to be drawn at some point and I don’t really think we draw it at a good point.” She also added that she does not think the complexities of subathons are really being discussed in the way they should be.
“Some things are okay and some things aren’t. We don’t really talk about that in gaming now and I don’t think it’s gonna be cool to talk about until like 20 years from now when we have data regarding the implications of that kind of behavior.”
