TimTheTatman signs exclusive streaming deal with YouTube

Jordan Beliles

Jordan Beliles

TimTheTatman leaves Twitch and announces exclusive streaming deal with YouTube Gaming

YouTube Gaming continues to poach Twitch's biggest creators

Today TimTheTatman announced that he has signed an exclusive streaming deal with YouTube Gaming. This marks another massive loss for Twitch as the platform's biggest streamers continue to leave for YouTube. Dr Lupo revealed his move to YouTube just two days ago. Prior to that, Dr Disrespect, Valkyrae and CouRage JD are were among Twitch's top talent that fled for exclusive contracts with YouTube. At this time, details of Tim's new contract have not been disclosed.

The day before the announcement TimTheTatman sent a cryptic tweet to his millions of fans. The photo showed a black void with two doors. There were no words, on the photo or the tweet itself. As his followers began to speculate, some had an inkling that Tim was leaving Twitch for good. The reason for these assumptions follow the recent swing of creators leaving Twitch. The tweet would be the precipice for the official announcement video where Tim acts out his old jobs before he became a streamer.

Tim dropped another video explaining how his new streams will operate and how fans can expect to find his content. He confirmed that his main YouTube channel will house his live streams and the full replays of those streams. In addition, his secondary channel (More TimTheTatman) will function as the main source of edited videos that would normally be on his main channel. Housekeeping aside, it looks like Tim's fans might see even more content after the switch.

Twitch's recent struggles

While YouTube Gaming was making one of its biggest announcements ever, Twitch was facing a boycott from hundreds of creators. Known as #ADayOffTwitch, streamers have deemed Sept. 1 as a day to forgo streaming and avoid watching content on the platform. The boycott comes as Twitch has failed to make meaningful progress against what are known as "hate raids". This is the process of spam botting someone's stream, often a person of color or marginalized group, with racist or hateful language. Spammers found a loophole in Twitch's so-called security measures that allows them to excessively post hateful language by using Latin characters.

Furthermore, former Twitch streamer Dr Disrespect, who's now on YouTube, recently informed his fans that he is suing the streaming platform. Twitch permanently banned Doc over a year ago in an oddly secretive fashion. To this day, his fans are left in the dark about why their favorite streamer received the ban. Twitch made no public announcement and offered no reasoning. However, while Doc informed his fans of the impending lawsuit, he mentioned he now knows the reason for his ban.