The closed beta launch of Riot Games’ new tactical first-person shooter VALORANT has driven unprecedented viewership on Twitch, and Summit1g might be the biggest beneficiary of anyone streaming the game.
Following 72 hours of streaming the game in just four days since it came out on Tuesday, not only has Summit recorded a whopping 13.75 million hours watched with an average of 175,514 viewers, but he’s also eclipsed 70,000 subscribers on the platform–a personal record.
Summit reached the number yesterday evening. Once the reality of his subscriber count sunk in, he couldn’t help but take a couple of moments to reflect, realizing how big of a deal hitting the mark meant in the grand scheme of his storied career as a Twitch streamer.
“Oh my god, is that the sexiest looking sub count you’ve ever seen?” he said. “This will never be topped. This is the peak of my career. This is it. This is fucking it. ‘Career,’ okay. This is the peak of my online hobby I do.”
Summit ended his stream in the early morning with the subscription counter on his stream reading 71,759 subs. Twitchtracker.com currently has his active sub count recorded as 73,260.
With hundreds of thousands of VALORANT fans looking to get access to the title via a Twitch drop, Summit has established himself as the top streamer on Twitch this week by a large margin due in part to his strenuous schedule.
In the past four days, Summit has had two streams of more than 20 hours, one that was just under 19.75 hours, and yesterday he streamed for nearly 13 hours. Overall, Summit spent just more than 75 hours streaming over the past four days (roughly 96 hours of calendar time).
Typically, about half of the revenue from a subscription goes to a streamer. So the normal $5 sub will net a content creator about $2.5. Top influencers like Summit tend to get a larger cut than that though.
In May of 2018, Ninja admitted in an interview with Forbes that his $5 subs netted him about $3.5, one dollar more than what a Twitch affiliate would get just starting up.
While Summit’s sub count is a personal record for him, he’s not the all-time sub leader by any stretch of the imagination. In 2018, Ninja’s climb to fame following the rise of Fortnite peaked at 250,055 subscriptions in March. The month was coincidentally also when he broke a Twitch viewership record while streaming alongside rappers Drake and Travis Scott, as well as Pittsburgh Steelers WR JuJu Smith-Schuster.
Currently, Summit’s subscription base is largely comprised of Twitch Prime subscription, as one might expect due to the fact that they come without cost to any person who has an Amazon Prime account and links it to their Twitch account.
Out of his total count, 40,813 subs are Prime subs. Tier 1 subs account for 23,105 subscribers, while Tier 2 accounts for 191 and Tier 3 accounts for 136 subs. Prior to this month, Summit’s highest number of active subscribers was 42,417 in January of 2019.
During that time, he spent the entire month playing exclusively Sea of Thieves. His 240 hours of airtime on the game, according to Sullygnome.com, was seen as a bold move to play something different from other top streamers who were primarily focusing on Fortnite at the time.
This likely isn’t the end for Summit’s rise, though. With Riot announcing that VALORANT beta drops will be available 24/7, the demand for Summit’s content will only increase as players continue to seek out more drops.
