“Riot Need Me”- Tyler1 Responds when He Heard that He Has More Watch-time than a LCS full week

Tyler ‘Tyler1’ Steinkamp, whether you love or hate him, is the most watched League of Legends streamer on Twitch platform.

Despite his Marmite personality, he rakes in a lot of viewership and claims that Riot Games “needs” him since he is watched more than the LCS. A fan cited a tweet from The Esports Observer during his stream yesterday that shows Tyler1 had more hours watched on Twitch than the official LCS channel for the past week. And this was despite the popular July 11 LCS match between Cloud9 and TSM.

This seems to surprise the streamer: “Wait, you’re telling me that more people watch me than LCS, like hours weekly?”. However, he burst out laughing while joking about Riot needing his popularity and being able to get away with being banned.

“No shit I don’t get banned!, they actually need me! Watch this: I’m going to int the fuck out of this game because I can’t be banned! Riot’s fucked!”

Evidently, Tyler1 is only watched more technically because of some very factors. As we can see, the stats displayed by The Esports Observer are correct, it focuses only on Twitch metrics and does not draw in LCS viewership from Youtube, where a significant portion of fans watch competitive LoL action.

Tyler1 streamed about 100 hours more content than the LCS over a seven-day period. Looking at the whole period since the start of the LCS Summer Split and up to now, according to Esports Charts Pro, the LCS has had more hours of streaming over Twitch and YouTube (8.8 million) than Tyler1 had with his streams (6.5 million).

Tyler1: “Aphelios’ turret is the full-build Jax!!!”

It was quite a turnaround for Tyler1. He was permanently banned from League in 2016 and also made enemies at Riot for creating more than 20 accounts to try to circumvent his ban.

While his accounts were being banned left and right, he decided to reform himself completely and made use of this opportunity to interact with his viewers. After showing signs of self-improvement in 2018, he was unbanned and quickly became once again one of the League community faces, this time on a more positive note.

And now, he is doing better than the LCS itself (by this admittedly very small metric).