Twitch responds to leak revealing earnings of top streamers and more

A Twitch leak has surfaced, which claims to reveal a huge amount of sensitive information including passwords and previous versions of the website. Perhaps biggest of all, however, was the earnings of popular streamers.

Twitch earnings are always kept somewhat under wraps. While viewers can figure out rough ballpark figures from a streamer’s number of subscribers, it’s nearly impossible to tally up the overall totals when including other revenue such as bits and ad revenue.

This leak, though, could completely blow that open, with precise figures for the biggest streamers since September 2019. It should be noted that this data only claims to be for revenue directly from Twitch, so it won’t include donations, sponsorships, or merch sales.

If accurate, it definitely makes for interesting reading regarding who the highest earners really are. Dexerto has asked multiple streamers featured on the list if the numbers are accurate, with mixed responses.

Some streamers have indicated that the leaked figures were almost exact for them, while others said they were incorrect and did not line up.

Leak reveals Twitch streamer earnings

The leak first popped up on 4chan, and immediately started doing the rounds on social media and throughout the community. Some users have taken to gathering all the data and provided a list, with streamers ranked with their rumored earnings before tax and after Twitch’s cut.

• Read More: Top 10 most viewed Twitch streamers

CriticalRole tops the list with an alleged $9.6m earned in those two years. It also sees the totals of other popular streamers like Asmongold ($2.5m), NICKMERCS (~$5.1m) and xQc (~$8.5m). The top twenty appears below.

Twitch leak: Highest earning streamers

Twitch streamers’ recent monthly earnings

Another list, though, breaking down each streamer’s monthly earnings for September 2021, does not quite align so precisely with some of those figures above.

For example, the list below sees Asmon earning $141k in Sept 2021, which over 24 months totals around $3.4m. Of course, that $141k won’t be the same every month, but there’s a notable disparity between $3.4m and $2.5m.

Twitch acknowledges “breach”

Twitch has since confirmed that a breach did take place, and that they are working “with urgency” to understand it’s extent.

In a blog post update on October 7, the Amazon-owned platform also shared the reason behind the hack: “We have learned that some data was exposed to the internet due to an error in a Twitch server configuration change that was subsequently accessed by a malicious third party.

“Our teams are working with urgency to investigate the incident.”

Were passwords, credit card details hacked?

During their investigation, Twitch focused on confirming that no private data, including login details, passwords, and credit card numbers were lost, and could potentially surface in any further leaked torrents.

They have confirmed there were no obvious breaches there.

“At this time, we have no indication that login credentials have been exposed,” Twitch admins wrote. “Additionally, full credit card numbers are not stored by Twitch, so full credit card numbers were not exposed.”

What else was leaked?

As well as earnings and account details (remember to change your password!), another major leak was an apparent Steam competitor.

Codenamed Vapor, the platform “Seems to integrate most of Twitch’s features as well as a bunch of game-specific support like Fortnite and PUBG.”

What this looks like down the line remains to be seen, but it will definitely be interesting to see how they aim to truly compete with Steam if this is true.

An anonymous company source has reportedly told VGC that the leaked data is legitimate, including the source code for the Amazon-owned streaming platform. As Twitch said, passwords were not believed to be stolen, but for extra safety, you may want to change your passwords regardless.

Dexerto has reached out to Twitch for comment.