Something funny has been happening on Twitch. First it was Ninja’s insane rise to popularity, growing his average users from 10k to over 100k in just 3 months. Next, there was the realization from numerous streamers that they were getting Twitch Prime subscriptions from users that were offline or freshly made accounts. Then, perhaps the oddest thing happened. Twitch told Polygon that everything was fine and that there were no bots whatsoever (despite the evidence that numerous streamers had reported).

That could be the end of the story, but it might also mean that something more complicated is going on. Could it be that Twitch is perfectly okay with the bot-like accounts? Or worse, could they or someone connected to them be the ones behind it all?

The first thing to know is that there is no smoking gun here, just a list of things that don’t add up. Companies like Twitch are saying one thing – everything is fine and operating normal – and users are saying another. In a very small window of time, one streamer has destroyed the record for streaming peaks and concurrent viewers, a number of Prime subscribers appear to be bots, and Twitch claims nothing is out of the ordinary. And everything that is going on appears to revolve around one game – Fortnite.

There is little denying that Fortnite is insanely popular. However, it seems a little lazy to say Ninja’s unprecedented rise to the top  and the subscriber issue are simply a result of its popularity. After all, the problem is that users are subscribing to streamers they don’t watch, sometimes while they are offline and sometimes by the hundreds. The savvy Redditor, Terronium, noted that in just two hours, Ninja got 838 subscribers all after going offline. 838 subscribers is more than most pro streamers – including the biggest – get in a single day of streaming. Ninja did it in 2 hours while offline. While it could be that Fortnite is simply that popular, it could also be that someone else wants Ninja’s numbers to be as high as possible.

It’s also worth pointing out that while Fornite is popular, PUBG still averages more than one million concurrent players. In fact, Fortnite has only recently passed the 3 million concurrent player benchmark, PUBG broke that in November of 2017, and held above that peak for nearly three months straight. Its current monthly peak still sits at a solid 2.7 million, and yet PUBG, for all its popularity, never came close to the streaming numbers Fortnite has pulled in. If Fortnite’s popularity is behind it all, it seems valid to argue that the Battle Royale that started it all, PUBG, should have come somewhere close to the same level of success – unless there is another factor not being taken into account.

One major factor is that Fortnite recently partnered with Twitch, something Twitch announced on February 28th. The partnership was also cross promoted by Epic Games with links on their site to Twitch Prime and Amazon Prime offers. This could certainly account for some of the disparity between PUBG and Fortnite, and Twitch and Ninja have been very vocal about their belief that this deal is a huge part of the success surrounding Fortnite.

The arrangement works like this – if someone links a Prime account to Fortnite, they get in-game skins and Twitch emotes. This incentivizes anyone that already has Prime to link to Fortnite, which helps boost Fortnite’s numbers by enticing players to play the free game. On the reverse, if Fortnite’s audience grows, more players will be interested in the skins, and Twitch should receive more Prime accounts. The two companies are essentially feeding profits into each other, and if one succeeds, in theory, the other will benefit.

It’s a great deal for both companies, but since Twitch also controls what games are at the top of their service, and therefore which are most watched, there could be an added incentive to tip the scale. After all, if Fortnite comes in as number one on Twitch, in theory, this should help their profits. It might just have been Fortnite’s own success boosting the game, but in two months, Fortnite went from 4000 channels on Twitch to 14,000 channels, a growth of 350% in two months.

It’s also worth mentioning that all of the suspicious activity with subscribers is through Prime subscriptions only, not normal subscriptions. It seems somewhat suspicious that Fortnite would start doing extremely well on Twitch right when Twitch would begin to benefit from the game’s success. It’s even more suspicious that Fortnite began seeing a huge amount of success through Prime subscriptions at the exact same time that suspicious activity with those accounts was first being reported. This is especially true if one streamer in particular, Ninja for example, suddenly sees an unprecedented spike in his numbers.

Most gamers will jump on a hype train, and what better way to create one than to have users subscribing to Ninja by the thousands – many of which are Prime subscribers, many of which are subscribing while he is offline or just after creating their accounts, and all in the midst of suspicious activity noted by several streamers. It makes Ninja’s success seem a little more than accidental and a little more calculated.

None of this is to attack Ninja though, or to discredit him as a streamer. He started as a pro player in Halo and has been streaming for five years. On top of that, he is an amazing Fortnite player, one that deserves to be ranked at the top of that fandom. That said, for those that watch many streams, his numbers are still rather unbelievable. After all, most of the best streamers are amazing at their respective games. Top LoL streamers routinely compete against pro players, often beating them, but they don’t see their numbers climbing to 100k. One Reddit thread even has hundreds of users questioning Ninja’s rise for exactly this reason. Many users simply don’t understand how it could be possible considering the numbers that streamers historically bring in. One Redditor, WhoChanges, noted:

The last two streamers to break streaming records were huge figures in the streaming world. Both Tyler1 and DrDisRespect were known across Reddit, Twitter, and the greater internet as memes and personalities. Both of these streamers’ record-breaking moments were also marked by a return to gaming after a huge controversy. Yet it took Tyler1 almost a month to earn 30k subscribers, and that is with his viewer numbers peaking at over 300k and hovering around 50-100k. In one day, Ninja earned 25k subscribers, and that was before his record of 635,429 concurrent viewers.

His stream that broke records – basically doubling the count of Tyler1 and DrDisRespect – did so when he partnered with not one, but three huge celebrities. He was joined in stream by Drake the rapper, JuJu Smith-Schuster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the rapper Travis Scott. It is worth asking how one streamer – who averaged 10k viewers in December – was able in three months to gain 10x his average viewer count and also somehow gain the attention of two rappers and a professional football player. For a streamer that struggled for five years to make a dent, it seems incredibly fortuitous timing.

Twitch, Amazon, and Ninja all declined to comment on this, but it does seem unlikely that one streamer – whose professional emails still direct to a yahoo account – would have the business knowhow or connections to make this happen. While it is possible Ninja could have coordinated and invented the idea, it seems unlikely the agents and press people for these huge celebrities would have cared if a single streamer was reaching out to them in a move that didn’t benefit them. After all, what does Ninja have to offer them? It doesn’t seem like Drake is that  big a gamer either, not when he joined Ninja’s chat via cellphone connection and had to be walked through installing Discord. It begs the question – how did Ninja convince someone so out of touch with gaming to play Fortnite with him?

It would make far more sense if Epic Games or Twitch were the ones actually responsible for this publicity stunt. After all, they would have the means to contact celebrities as well as the wallets to convince them. It also makes sense that they would want a streamer to work with – one who has been struggling to make it but with the skills and personality to be a spokesman. In that way, Ninja is perfect. If those companies could also convince Ninja to make any promotions seem natural and unforced, that would be even better. This is actually a current trend in marketing anyway, something known as ‘native advertising.’ The idea is simply to advertise without the appearance of obviously advertising.

For example, Ninja’s interview with CNBC seemed more like he was promoting Fortnite than playing it.

Asked about Fortnite’s success, Ninja doesn’t mention the rise of Battle Royales or the crowd that surely came from PUBG or H1Z1 – which is exactly where he came from. Instead, he ticks off the selling points of the game: free-to-play across all platforms, a recent release on iOS, and a possible port to the Switch. He ends with, “They are hitting every mark perfectly.”

When asked about his own success (and if he really is making $500,000 a month), he answers that it is a combination of many things. Then at 1:06 into the video, he switches gears and most of his answer about his own success are suddenly tied into talking about Twitch’s newest promotion – Twitch Prime.

This could all just be a coincidence though. Ninja’s success could be his own skill coupled with the rise of a popular game. His comments in the interview could be his humble attempt to credit the Fortnite-Twitch promotion for his own success. The suspicious activity from new accounts and subscribers that are offline could simply be a fluke. Twitch and Epic Games partnering could be a wise business decision to jump onto a rising tide. It could all be just great timing and opportunism. But even if the best case scenario is true, it raises worrisome possibilities.

Twitch has a partnership with Epic Games. That much is a fact. If they are guilty of colluding to get Fortnite to the top of the charts, that’s immoral, dishonest, and unfair to their viewers and streamers. If they are innocent, then it means they have found a golden goose for gaming companies. As Twitch and Ninja have said, the thousands of subscribers flooding Twitch might just be from their promotion, but what message does that send  to other developers? It says that not only is Twitch for sale, but that it works. The key to success is not about who streams the best or who makes the best game; it’s about who has the deepest wallets.