One of the top CS:GO streamers on Twitch called out for allegedly view botting

Nikolarn, a Twitch streamer with over 500,000 followers who mostly creates Counter-Strike content, was called out by several prominent members of the CS community on Sept. 11 for allegedly making use of bots to boost his viewership on the Amazon-owned platform.

The discussion around Nikolarn’s numbers was sparked after Dima Wallhacks, a CS content creator, released a video about Nikolarn’s Twitch channel on Twitter. The video by Dima Wallhacks showed that even though Nikolarn has averaged around 10,000 viewers per CS stream over the past year, according to SullyGnome’s numbers, Nikolarn barely gains any followers per stream.

Dima Wallhacks also showed that Nikolarn’s chat is quite active, but not a lot of people who interact are subscribers. Based on his own findings, Dima Wallhacks accused Nikolarn of using bots to boost the channel’s numbers and “make bank.” Nikolarn’s Twitch bio shows that the channel is sponsored by two gambling CS websites and, most notably, by G2A, a digital retail store for games that has sponsored several CS:GO teams, including Cloud9 and Virtus Pro.

After Dima Wallhacks released his findings, other prominent members of the CS community pointed out that they think Nikolarn has allegedly been view botting for years. “He’s been doing it forever afaik, everyone stopped bothering at some point,” Mrtweeday, a CS streamer with over 500,000 followers on Twitch, wrote. Nikolarn’s Twitch channel was created in July 2014.

When looking at Nikolarn’s numbers on SullyGnome, the tracking platform shows that Nikolarn has streamed 745 hours of CS:GO in the past 365 days and has an average viewership of 10,579 people. These numbers are higher than what famous professional players such as m0NESY and FalleN post, though they’ve streamed considerably less.

FalleN and m0NESY, however, usually gain thousands of followers whenever they stream on Twitch, according to SullyGnome.

Dot Esports has reached out to both Nikolarn and Twitch but didn’t receive a response at the time of publication.