Asmongold has hit back at accusations he is receiving secret payments from FFXIV developers to play their game on Twitch, and that those same “under the table” payments are why he speaks out against WoW regularly.
Twitch’s resident MMO guru, Asmongold, has laughed off claims he is secretly paid to play FFXIV by Square Enix developers in a bid to get more players in their game.
The claims go something like this — Asmongold doesn’t really like Final Fantasy XIV (an accusation he’s faced several times) and is only playing the MMORPG because he is getting paid to, all “under the table,” in an effort to drive up player numbers for the growing WoW rival.
Asmongold has now moved to deny the rumors.
“This is what people really think,” the Twitch star laughed. “Every time I play a new game, it actually has to be a shady backroom deal, that’s all it could be.”
Asmongold denied the rumors on January 9, claiming anyone who thinks he accepts any money to play Final Fantasy XIV over World of Warcraft is “literally stupid.”
“What do you think happens, I go to this random place, and there’s a shady backroom deal going down?” he laughed. “Like, at the back office they’re fixing horse races and fixing boxing matches, there’s blinds over the windows, smoke everywhere, and they decide to pay me one-hundred grand to stream Final Fantasy?”
“I swear that’s literally what these people think, conspiracy theories. That’s what they think, it’s just Peaky f**king Blinders at Twitch or something. This is the world they live in… they don’t know real life.
“That never happens. It never happens that way,” he said. “No company is going to pay you, under the table, to stream a game unless they’re super, super shady.”
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“Gambling companies, NFT, crypto, maybe they do it,” he said, “but it’s just such a huge violation. You can go to jail. Or get fined by the government. We put #ad in the title of streams for a reason. Come on, think.
“No one wants to do that [declare ads], but it’s the law. No one is avoiding doing that, or they’d be going away for a long time, and paying a lot, a lot of money.”
Asmongold went on to explain that he has, “of course,” accepted money to stream games before — with his foray into Old School Runescape a prime example — but every partnership he’s done has been above board and legitimate.
“Generally, I don’t really play a lot of sponsored games though,” he added. “And, I’ve never, never had someone approach me to try and pay me under the table to play their game. That isn’t something that happens on Twitch guys, come on. People just believe whatever they want to believe, really.”
The Twitch star hasn’t actually streamed FFXIV in 2022 yet, instead favoring the Dark Souls trilogy, New World, and even WoW on his alt-account streams.
