Sykkuno is one of five content creators who were invited to co-stream the final of the League of Legends World Championship this year. But League fans and streamers aren’t thrilled about it. They even called it disrespectful.
Macaiyla, who has been a long-standing member of the community alongside her partner, Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp, summarized their feelings in a scathing message directed at Riot Games.
“Hiring Sykkuno is honestly super disappointing and disrespectful to the people who primarily stream League on a daily basis,” she said. “I get your goal is viewership and potentiality expanding your audience but you already have lil nas for that. Pretty odd choices in general.”
Sykkuno reacted to the outrage during his stream on Nov. 1. He admitted he “kind of gets” why a lot of people are upset about it, but wanted to provide some context to cool the waters.
“Riot messaged and they were like, ‘Hey, do you want to watch Worlds and stream it?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. That sounds fun. I like League of Legends’ and that was it,” he said.
“I didn’t know it was some kind of big deal. I guess for a lot of other people it’s a much bigger deal,” he added.
Sykkuno broke them down into three categories: people who are mad at Riot about it, people who are mad at him about it because they don’t like him, and people who are mad because they wanted to stream it themselves.
He can sympathize with people in the first and last categories, but said he can’t do anything about the people in the second category, since they’d be mad no matter what he did.
For what it’s worth, though, he wanted to assure them that he wasn’t paid to do it.
“Do you know how many zeros were in the offer? Do you know how many zeros they offered me? They offered me one zero, because I am doing it for free… there’s exactly one zero.” he said.
Sykkuno wrapped up his thoughts by saying the situation is “really not as crazy as anybody thinks.” He’s still looking forward to doing it, and he hopes his fans will enjoy it, too.
The Worlds 2022 final and the co-streams that will run alongside it kick off at 7pm CT on Nov. 5.
