Sunday was a busy day in sports. There was a pretty important NFL game. And the LCS, of course. But just as things were winding down, a few people on Twitch noticed something: Faker was streaming. For real.
For years, Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok streamed on Twitch competitor Azubu. There, even the best player in the history of League streamed to a small audience. Such was the hunger for fans to watch Faker on Twitch that, for a brief time, one fan defied Riot to stream Faker’s soloqueue games.
Few Korean players typically use Twitch to connect to their Western fans. But things started changing right after last season’s World Championship, when popular ROX Tigers jungler Yoon “Peanut” Wang-ho tried Twitch for the first time. The results were pretty spectacular, even though most viewers couldn’t understand his Korean. He shot up the rankings and became one of Twitch’s most popular League streamers.
That seemed to open the door for last week’s news that all of SKT were moving over to the western platform and abandoning Azubu entirely. The one missing name was Faker’s, even though a page existed for him.
On Sunday, it looks like that page was made official. Faker hopped on for only a brief time, but as of writing, over 77,000 fans have viewed the page and over 18,000 fans have followed Faker. It remains to be seen, however, how often Faker will actually activate his stream and give Western fans an up-close look at his solo queue domination.
If he gets it up and running, Imaqtpie and Doublelift better move over, because a new sheriff will be in town.
Update 1.10pm CT: After some technical difficulties, Faker is now live. He has already broken the record for most concurrent viewers on an individual streamer’s channel with a peak of 245,100 concurrent viewers. Twitch also confirmed that SKT is now officially on Twitch, so you can expect to see the whole team go live on the platform more often.
