Over half a million people piled into Michael ‘Shroud’ Grzesiek’s first stream on Twitch in nine months yesterday, according to stats shared by the streamer himself.
With Shroud being silent on his future as a streamer following the fall of Mixer – bar a few short teasers of his new stream intro – he revealed on August 11 that he would be “coming home” to Twitch. And boy, was he given a grand welcome. Despite admitting he was expecting around 150,000 – 200,000 viewers, Shroud had well over 300,000 watching his waiting screen before he even showed his face. That number surged to an incredible peak of 516,298 viewers, according to a screenshot of his analytics that he posted to Twitter. That’s extremely close to the peak viewership achieved by another streamer who made a comeback this month; Guy ‘Dr DisRespect’ Beahm.
While that initial peak did begin to tail off, Shroud’s stream never dipped below 100,000 viewers, and averaged out at 222,000 concurrent viewers across the entire broadcast.
According to Esports Charts Pro, this equates to just over a million hours of watch time in a single stream, which is pretty nuts.
During the early stages of his stream, the chat was just an endless stream of subscriptions and gifted subs. Only a few minutes in, Shroud revealed that he had received around 13,000 subs already, an absolutely mind-blowing figure. By the end of the stream, he ended up with over 16,000 new subscribers, as well as 254,000 new followers.
I pictured an epic return… not quite like this though <3 pic.twitter.com/zRCFAhp7HX
— Michael Grzesiek (@shroud) August 13, 2020
The insane amount of new subscribers means Shroud will have made at least $45,000 during his comeback stream – and that’s the conservative estimate. It’s likely some of these were Tier 2 or Tier 3 subs, which would have generated even more cash. That’s also without taking into consideration donations and the sizeable ad revenue he’d get for running ads to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
While Shroud was always going to draw a crowd with a Twitch return, there weren’t many – including him – who expected the crowd to be quite this big.