Kick bets on xQc in 2-year $100M deal

Streamer and former Overwatch League pro Félix “xQc” Lengyel has signed a two-year, $70 million contract with streaming platform Kick.

News of the deal comes from a report published today by the New York Times. The deal can reach up to a ceiling of $100 million should xQc hit several incentive marks during his two-year stay with the platform.

This enormous streamer-to-platform contract is a milestone for Kick, which has emerged over the last year as the biggest rival to streaming giant Twitch. While Twitch has largely held firm in the face of other competitors to sign its biggest stars to contracts—including Mixer, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming—Kick has come to the forefront as a potential threat.

Kick averages between 50,000 and 200,000 viewers across all its streams at any given time, according to viewership stats site Streamscharts. That number is expected to grow immensely with xQc’s presence on the service.

Keep in mind that xQc’s contract with Kick is non-exclusive, meaning he’ll still have the right to appear on other streaming sites. According to Kick CEO Ed Craven via the New York Times, xQc will appear intermittently on TikTok, YouTube, and even Twitch (although at a much more infrequent rate). 

Perhaps the most striking “selling point” of Kick is its substantially smaller cut-rate of subscription revenue. While Twitch takes 50 percent of all subscription revenue from streamers, Kick only scrapes five percent of that total number off the top. Earlier this month, Twitch announced (then immediately walked back) new regulations that would make it more difficult for streamers to run third-party ads on their streams. That announcement caused significant backlash from the Twitch community, prompting further discussion that more streamers could be jumping ship in the near future. 

“Kick is allowing me to try and do things I haven’t been able to before,” xQc said in a statement. “It should have been a difficult conversation with every platform in the space throwing offers my way, but after speaking to Kick and the team behind it, the choice was obvious.”

Related: Twitch introduces 70/30 revenue split for partners with new program—but there’s a catch

Over the last year-plus, Twitch has lost some of its biggest stars, including Ludwig, Sykkuno, and Myth, to YouTube. While Kick certainly doesn’t have the same steady capital as the Google-affiliated site, it could become just as relevant. 

A date and time for xQc’s first post-contract-signing stream on Kick is still to be announced.