xQc breaks his Twitch viewership record again after viral r/Place stream

Twitch streamer xQc beat his own personal record for peak viewership twice in two days, hitting 233,000 and then over 290,00, live viewers, while creating his r/Place artwork – which was censored by Reddit moderators and prevented from making it onto the canvas.

r/Place has returned for April Fools Day 2022. This subreddit, organized by Reddit itself, allows all users the chance to add a ’tile’ to a massive canvas of digital art.

Started in 2017, it has been brought back this year, and has been especially popular with Twitch streamers trying to get their artwork added. The canvas is covered in memes and internet references submitted by millions of users.

With the help of his community of hundreds of thousands of viewers, xQc was able to make take up an especially large portion of the canvas – however, it wasn’t exactly an innocent image.

xQc’s r/Place art censored

Depicting the rear of a woman, the art was quickly censored, covered by a black shaded area.

However, this did little to deter xQc and his viewers, and instead spurned them on. Because the artwork is collaborative, each individual pixel can be changed by a single user. So, xQc encouraged viewers to join in and bring the ‘booty’ back.

With all the commotion, probably attracting Reddit users who hadn’t watched xQc before, his stream numbers sharply rose.

• Read More: xQc claps back at Twitch streamers & viewers using his emotes as memes

His previous peak viewership record was 220,720, in April 2020, when Valorant beta key drops were driving viewership higher for lots of streamers.

His ‘Dominating r/Place’ stream surpassed this record, however, reaching 233,000 viewers. Then, on Monday, April 4, as the antics continued on the final day of r/Place, he set another personal best at just over 290,000 concurrent viewers.

xQc also addressed some of the backlash, mainly from non-xQc viewers who were frustrated that his community was effectively taking over the artwork.

“I just enjoy doing it, I think it’s fun to make things kinda different. I think it’s fun. It gives everybody something to… it makes everybody feels something, and it made people rebuild and build sh*t.

“I feel like it was a lot of fun for everybody. At the end of the day, whatever you think is ‘destroyed’ and rebuilt, it gave you something to do. I’m sorry if I hurt or ‘malded’ you. I thought this was just a canvas for fun, on a fun website.”