Apex Legends Gave Top Twitch Streamer 500 Subscribers For Playing Their Game

Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek is considered as the face of Apex Legends on Twitch. This was cemented even further on Sunday, March 24, when Respawn Entertainment gave him 500 subscribers.

This equates to $2,500, before Twitch took their share of the revenue.

The streamer was audibly shocked by the donations, and is heard to ask: “What is happening?” as subscribers kept appearing.

On a Reddit thread regarding the gifting, it sparked a bit of a debate. One fan wrote: “Hmm this feels like it could be a slippery slope of companies doing this to entice streamers to play their games without it needing to be declared as advertising. Seems weird.”

Another commented: “The reason you need #sponsored in the title is when the sponsorship is hidden from viewers. The deal was made off-stream, so viewers need to know the important context that the streamer was paid.

“Here the whole deal is totally in the open. We know the exact amount he got paid (minus Amazon’s cut). And we know there are no additional terms of the deal (like minimum streaming time, etc.). Shroud could have switched games immediately and he wouldn’t have to give the money back — there were no obligations on him.

“However there is an argument that these donation messages don’t last so it might be hidden from future/newer viewers. e.g. Epic did the same thing and all of a sudden he switches to Fortnite and the Fortnite category gets a huge boost.”

The argument continued, with another Redditor saying: “Not really that big of a deal, 2500 worth in subs is nothing compared to, say, the $1mil EA paid Ninja to promote Apex (source: Forbes) or the multiple tens of thousand dollars big streamer likely get from their hourlong promotion sessions (I specifically remember Moonmoon and Disguisedtoast talk about how absurdly top heavy sponsorship deals get, and if anything proves it its the 1mil deal Ninja made)”