Overwatch League Rakes in over 10 Million Viewers in Opening Week

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Trolling in Twitch Chat Could Earn You Jail Time

Brandan Apple of British Columbia is in a lot of trouble. In February and March of 2017, Apple launched an attack on Twitch using a service called ChatSurge, whose purpose is to “flood, destroy or simply demolish any Twitch.tv chatroom.” Apple went on a trolling spree that spanned over 1000 different streamers’ accounts and sent over 150,000 spam messages. His spamming of channels made chats impossible to manage, it shut down several streamers and, according to Twitch, significantly slowed the servers down. Twitch then committed over 200 hours of time to tracking Apple through numerous sources before discovering his identity.

Now, Apple faces the criminal charge of “mischief in relation to computer data,” which, depending on the damages Twitch cites, could carry a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison and at a minimum will carry fines of thousands of dollars.

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Tencent Signs Deals With Ubisoft and Lego

The Ubisoft-Tencent deal revolves around Tencent’s Chinese app, Weixin, and Ubisoft’s French mobile gaming subsidiary, Ketchapp. Weixin recently debuted a companion app called Weixin Mini-Game and thanks to this new deal, Ketchapp games will now be a big part of Weixin Mini-Game. In a joint press release, the heads of both Ubisoft and Tencent praised the deal as mutually beneficial and exciting for the mobile gamers of China.

he goal of Tencent and Lego’s partnership is to create a series of Lego-based games that will apparently be geared towards children. In a statement on Lego’s website, the Vice President of Tencent, Thirty Sun, said that “A positive and healthy online experience for children is very important with more and more children connecting digitally. Tencent is accountable for protecting the online experience of every child, and we incorporate online child protection in all aspects of our business practices.” 

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YouTube’s New Monetization Rules Continue to Hurt Creators

In a recent blog post, YouTube high-ups Neal Mohan and Robert Kyncl addressed their new monetization rules. In the lengthy post, they managed not once to comment on any of the issues the community has been concerned with. The Logan Paul controversy, despite featuring an actual dead body, was not mentioned once. In fact, in a sister article on monetization for advertisers, YouTube also failed to identify the ‘bad actors’ as they called them that were operating at the highest levels of their infrastructure.

Instead, the new rules being rolled out will affect tens of thousands of content creators on the very bottom of the barrel. Previously, users needed only 10,000 total channel views to be eligible for monetization, something already challenging for niche creators. The new rules will require 4,000 hours of watchtime as well as 1,000 subscribers for the past 12 months. While Mohan and Kyncl made half-hearted attempts to make this sound like a positive for the community, they ultimately admitted what drove the choice — “These higher standards will help us prevent potentially inappropriate videos from monetizing which can hurt revenue for everyone.”

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