Twitch has found out about the highly inappropriate (and sometimes illegal) streams taking over the Artifact channel, and they’ve taken action.
It looks like the party’s over. No sooner do we find out about the Artifact Twitch directory being used for basically anything BUT streaming Artifact do we also find out that Twitch has caught on and is shutting the party down.
As a quick refresher, the Artifact Twitch directory has--for whatever reason--become a haven for illegal streams. Those include things like a pirated version of Avengers: Endgame, various anime TV shows, X-rated content, various memes, and basically any game except Artifact.
This is obviously against the rules, so once the media found out it was only a matter of time before Twitch got involved and starting banning accounts.
A recent Twitter post reveals the outcome of its internal investigation. According to Twitch, most of the streams found on the Artifact directory were actually “automated accounts”, or bots in the common parlance. No surprise there as clicking on many of the streams seemed to reveal pre-recorded gameplay and not live events.
"We are working with urgency to remove the offending content and suspend all accounts engaged in this behavior,” the streaming platform went on to explain. “In addition, we have temporarily suspended the ability for new creators to stream."
That last bit might seem like a huge blow to the Artifact streaming community, but in actual fact, there isn’t much of an Artifact community in general. Steamcharts reports an average of just 135 players over the past 30 days, and it seems doubtful that any of those players are bothering to stream.
Taking a look at the Artifact directory reveals that the copyrighted content such as movies and TV shows have all been removed, as has the x-rated stuff. But the memes, oh god the memes are all that's left. Just an endless sea of memes as far as the eye can see.
We’re sure Twitch will eventually clean up the memes, but until then, this is basically what Twitch would look like if 4chan were to take over the streaming service.