Escape From Tarkov drops on Twitch are coming back

Twitch will have another in-game drop event for survival shooter Escape from Tarkov from June 11 to 22, Battlestate Games announced today. But the game’s top content creator doesn’t seem to be happy about the promotion. 

Battlestate and Twitch partnered at the end of 2019 into 2020 for a drop event that awarded players meaningful in-game items for watching streamers on Twitch. The resulting viewership for the game made it the most-watched content on the platform at the start of 2020.

Trying to give players every opportunity to get the rewards they wanted, endemic streamers like Pestily, who’s consistently been the game’s most-watched streamer, spent significantly more time broadcasting than they typically do.

While the high influx of positive publicity was strong enough to encourage both Twitch and Battlestate to bring the event back about six months later, Pestily, who knows a thing or two about EFT, isn’t excited about what giving players more meaningful and substantive rewards could do to the game’s economy.

“Honestly… the economy is already in question,” he tweeted. “Why blow it out even more by adding 10 days of drops? This would be much better in the final 1-2 months of the wipe. Wipe July?”

During EFT’s first Twitch drop event, the game eclipsed 30 million hours watched from Dec. 30 to Jan. 5 after recording a little more than 60 million hours watched for all of 2019 before the event. Pestily was the most-watched content creator during that week with 7.5 million hours watched.

But it looks like Pestily won’t be as stoked to play during the event this time around because of the way it’ll inflate the game’s resources. Being a survival game, EFT is predicated on players looting and surviving each round to build up resources.

While this Twitch event will inevitably be a strong promotion for the game and reel in more players, the effect that it’ll have on the amount of gear players are carrying around could be harmful to the game’s balance and economy. 

It doesn’t seem like he’s too ridiculously upset about it, however. Pestily said on Twitch early today that he’ll be on during the first day of the event for a 24-hour stream. So regardless of whether it’s good or bad for the game’s ecosystem, it appears as though Pestily is prepared to promote the game he’s spent more than 1,000 hours streaming this year alone.