Just a day after a former Kick employee uploaded a video detailing issues they had with the company, xQc defended the streaming site.
On June 17, an ex-Kick staff member, Melissa, uploaded a video to YouTube exposing employees of the platform. In the video, she claimed that she resigned from the company because of the “extremely hostile” office environment.
“There was a consistent disrespect to other people’s opinions and beliefs. This went as far as consistently hearing the F-slur and not only just in gist as a joke, it was specifically targeted towards people it was supposed to discriminate against,” she said.
Melissa also shared several stories about how Kick allegedly mistreated an autistic streamer and how they allegedly tried to use a big streamer’s cancer battle to sign them for less money.
It wasn’t long until Kick’s biggest creators took to their channel to react to the video, including Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel, who signed a massive $100M non-exclusive deal with the streaming platform in July 2023.
xQc quickly tied the cancer story to Kyedae, a beloved Twitch streamer who publicly shared her battle with Acute Myeloid Leukemia throughout 2023.
During the stream, Lengyel said that as far as he was aware, Kick and Stake never reached out to the Twitch star.
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“I asked, and there was no communication to Kyedae from Kick or Stake. I even sent people to investigate if Kick ever said anything to Kyedae and I didn’t get anything,” he said.
While the former Kick employee never put a name to the streamer in question with her allegations, Kyedae is the most well-known streamer who has battled cancer over the last year.
Melissa also alleged that Kick proudly “decimated” the pay rate for a special-needs streamer in his contract renewal, and many connected the story with Adin Ross giving his friend JakeFuture27 a paid contract to stream with Kick.
xQc shared his thoughts on those claims as well, saying that his new pay rate was based on the number of concurrent viewers he gets on average — which he says is about 50.
Later in the stream, xQc revealed that he’s “part of the team” at Kick, but that doesn’t hold him back from pointing out negative things about the platform. He said that moderation “sucked” when he first joined in 2023, but meetings with higher-ups have made things a lot better on the site.
The Juicer still streams on Twitch as well, albeit not as much as he once did. On June 14, though, he was left baffled after the platform’s new Power-ups feature allowed users to flood the screen with emojis.
