Tfue is back to streaming, but instead of returning to Twitch, he’s heading to new, Stake-adjacent streaming site Kick.
The former Fortnite god is officially back, and Kick has struck another blow in its streaming wars against Twitch. Kick has taken several veiled and not-so-veiled shots at the Amazon-owned Twitch since it launched a little over a year ago in October 2022. Kick is credited with forcing Twitch to give better subscription splits to its streamers to prevent them from leaving for the upstart website, which featured Trainwrecks when it launched.
Tfue’s announcement was conveyed in a way that only he could pull off: featuring a tornado chug of a Modelo, “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project (the theme song of the 1990s Chicago Bulls), and a pack of American Spirits. It seems like the time away hasn’t changed the “bro” vibe that Tfue is known for in the streaming world at all, and if anything it might have enhanced it. With a new Kick contract, Tfue is free to do, more or less, whatever he wants.
Snagging Tfue for its platform is far from Kick’s biggest blow in the current fight for livestreaming eyeballs. Earlier in the year, Kick signed streaming superstar xQc, soccer insider Fabrizio Romano, and chess grandmaster Hikaru.
In June, Tfue announced he would be taking an extended break from streaming.
“I used gaming to kind of escape from reality,” he said in a video. “Now I use reality to escape from fucking work. I just feel fucking trapped sometimes, you know.”
The burnout from streaming is one of many challenges the Fortnite standout has faced. In mid-2020, he settled a lawsuit with his former team, FaZe Clan, over alleged unlawful control of sponsorship deals by the company and acting as Tfue’s agent of sorts.
