The price of fame – how it works and how much it costs the audience to cheat on Twitch

Disclaimer: Cybersport.ru administration does not encourage the use of bots and does not call for their purchase to promote the channel. The purpose of this article is to acquaint readers with the phenomenon of wrapping up and try to answer some of the most popular questions about it.

How to get viewers on Twitch and how much does it cost?

As it turned out, getting viewers on Twitch is no more difficult than buying a game on Steam or ordering pizza over the Internet. I never did streams, so I immediately got into Google for information. The search engine did not disappoint: the very first page gave me dozens of services that, for a small fee, offered to feel like a starring star in online broadcasts. I chose those that were designed for a Russian-speaking audience and had a more intuitive interface that resembles an online store.

A quick study of the assortment showed that most of the wrapping services are very similar to each other. Almost all of them are primarily designed for Twitch and YouTube, but there are those who work with broadcasts on Mixer, WASD.TV and social networks. There are different tariffs for each platform, which, in addition to the price, differ in the maximum number of bots. For example, on some services, cheating on YouTube is cheaper than on Twitch, but there is a more stringent restriction on the duration and number of bots. It was also striking that all services lure customers in about the same way – they guarantee anonymity and protection against a ban, provide online consultations and even promise a refund if the service is rendered incorrectly.

I was surprised that the wrapping services do not have any single price grid. For example, if one site sold 20 viewers for ₽65 per day, then on another I was offered to buy the same 20 spectators, but for ₽200 per day. The third generally turned out to be the per-minute tariffication with no time limit, in which the daily package with 20 spectators would cost almost ₽300. In the cheapest package, bots do not have a chat function, and only this can I explain such a difference in price. On the other hand, on the other two services, chat is provided in the tariff, but their prices still differ by almost a third.

The situation with the most expensive daily rates is different: two services offered to wind 200 bots for ₽435 and ₽440 respectively. A site with per-minute billing for a daily wrap of 200 people modestly requested almost ₽3 thousand. Well, that’s why per minute tariffing. The maximum number of viewers in the most expensive packages has a limit of 200-500 people. Most bots are given only to those who buy the most expensive monthly subscriptions. The cost of such can reach ₽17–20 thousand

Prices for cheating on various sites:

It was not a big deal to deal with tariffs, but the site administrators who sell cheat introduced me to other nuances. They agreed to talk on condition of anonymity, talked about their work and interesting clients, and also helped answer some questions.

As it turned out, you can cheat viewers on absolutely any channel, even if you created it five minutes ago and have not yet conducted a single broadcast there. It doesn’t even have to be exactly your channel – bots can be bought for any streamer on the platform. In this regard, for the wrapping sites there is no difference. All that is required is to buy a package and activate it in your account during or before the start of the broadcast, and soon after that, viewers will come to the channel you have indicated. In most cases, activation cannot be canceled. That is, if you bought a package for several hours, activated it, and then could not continue broadcasting due to problems with the Internet or other factors, then the money is unlikely to be returned to you. However, some services go towards regular customers in such situations.

According to administrators, most often they buy short-term tariffs – for one or several hours. There are very few customers who take large subscriptions for long periods of time – from a week to a month. They explain this by the fact that there are many beginner streamers among wrapping buyers who do not yet have a certain broadcast schedule and a “developed habit of regularly broadcasting”. It’s easier for them to buy a wrap for a specific time immediately before starting the stream.

Who buys streams and why?

Describing an approximate “portrait” of an ordinary cheating buyer, all administrators agreed that these are mostly novice gamers who want to try their hand at the stream industry and playlist. Most often, cheats are used by players in Dota 2, CS: GO, Fortnite and Hearthstone, and recently, a lot of customers from Valorant have been added. Sometimes someone buys viewers for the Just Chatting category, but this rarely happens.

The main motive for cheating is to raise your channel in the list of streams of a particular discipline. The air with a couple of viewers will always be at the bottom of the issue, while real visitors can enter the channel with 200 bots. That is why the administrators of the cheat sites do not recommend “streaming” the broadcasts in some super-popular sections with a large number of streams and a live audience. For example, having scored 500 viewers in the Dota 2 category, you can get into the top 20 / top 30 streamers, and the same 500 viewers in the Valorant section are unlikely to help even enter the top 100. There are a lot of problems on Twitch with a shooter from Riot Games. To lure viewers with “drops” (access to Valorant beta test), they twist records of their past streams all day long. It’s funny that most of the viewers of these broadcasts are also bots that catch these same “drops”. So it turns out a vicious circle when pseudo-viewers watch a pseudo-stream.

Wrappers often encounter unusual orders. So, one of the clients with the help of bots planned to win a dispute with a friend, and the other tried to impress the girl and, apparently, wanted to make her an offer, but “something went wrong.” Some streamers bought bots for presentation at work or in front of potential advertisers. By the way, during the quarantine, the number of clients at sites with cheats increased by an average of 20-30%. Service administrators say that many people just got bored of sitting at home, while others tried to turn broadcasts into an additional source of income. However, to make a top-end popular channel exclusively a wrapper without its own charisma or a live audience will still fail. To check the work of bots, I myself bought a couple of dozen viewers on Twitch, but Mixer directors are in no hurry to offer me an exclusive contract.

How many viewers can you maximize? Most sites with wrap-ups do not just have their limits and tariff limits set – the whole thing is in the pool of available bots. Suppose the service has five thousand bots at its disposal: they can be distributed among 50 customers and get 50 streams with 100 spectators on each, or you can send all bots to a single channel and win 5 thousand spectators there at once. According to the second scheme, almost no one works, since all the administrators with whom I spoke prefer to expand the client base with an eye to the future, and not to ensure the interests of only one customer.

Sometimes adjustments to this scheme may be made by the time of day. For example, in the morning hours there are usually few streams, therefore the bots of the wrapping services often “stand idle”, which means that at the beginning of the day they can be bought in large quantities. In the evening there are many streams, and there may not be enough bots for everyone. Of course, the situations are different, and if the demand coincides with the possibilities, then a couple of thousand viewers can get you on the channel. All that is needed is money and good relations with the administration.

Is cheating easy to identify?

The more bots, the greater the risk of causing suspicion, although the service administrators assured me that the ban of the channel was excluded. From their explanation, I realized that Twitch algorithms simply do not distinguish bots from ordinary users. In addition, bots are constantly updating IP addresses, and no one will be able to prove your involvement in cheating. Although the system itself is not able to detect a streamed stream, this does not mean that one of the real users will not be able to complain about such a channel. It is possible, but difficult to distinguish a wound stream from the present. Here a lot depends on the level of wrapping up and the number of live viewers.

If 50-100 people are watching your broadcast, but no one is chatting, then this already looks suspicious. If there are two thousand spectators on the stream, hardly anyone will notice that 500 or even half of them are bots. According to administrators, cheating can be replaced only if the number of bots is 50-60% higher than the number of live viewers. It’s also impossible to calculate the bots by nicknames, since they all generate a name “close to real”. Sometimes Twitch and other services still ban some of the bots – this happens no more than once a month and does not cause much trouble to their owners who simply create new ones.

Some cheat services, in addition to regular bots, also provide chat bots with which you can simulate live communication on the channel. For example, a streamer (or his partner) can write a chat message on behalf of a bot, then reply on behalf of another bot, etc. On some services, dialogs or bot reactions can be set up in advance, saved to a text file and then loaded during broadcasts. In this case, the specified replicas will be automatically published in the chat with a certain interval.

With due diligence with chat bots, you can play a real performance, scandal with yourself or praise for a good game. Alas, the bots will not be able to imitate a visit to your channel of top streamers or star cybersportsmen – you cannot use the names of existing users. On the other hand, thousands of people still cannot distinguish official streams from scam broadcasts, which have recently become a headache for Twitch.

The problem of scammers

Recently, fake broadcasts allegedly on behalf of professional players have begun to appear on Twitch. Such streams lure viewers with byte headers about skins, and then ask the audience to register on a special site to collect these prizes. In fact, the main goal of scammers is to get your personal data, with which you can steal accounts on Steam, hack mail or social networks for the purpose of extortion or blackmail.

Now this topic is very painful in the community: e-sportsmen are asking Twitch to tighten moderation and not allow scammers to use their names and nicknames for scams. Journalist and insider Jarek DeKay Lewis even called for a class action against the platform. At the same time, the number of victims due to their own carelessness of the audience is growing with each such stream. Unfortunately, Twitch employees did not respond to our requests and did not explain how the platform is going to deal with scammers. One thing is for sure – this problem will not have a quick and easy solution.

According to the administrators of the cheat sites, they do not serve scammers and do not provide them with bots for fake streams. Typically, scammers use their own programs and expensive proxies to quickly cheat several thousand viewers. In addition, scam streams immediately attract attention and very quickly receive complaints from viewers. Twitch moderators do not always respond quickly to them, but there is no doubt that such a stream will be banned.

In recent months, scammers have imitated the streams of many famous e-sportsmen, among which Christopher GeT_RiGhT Alesund, Alexander s1mple Kostylev and Mike shroud grzesik. Professional players are increasingly having to urge fans to be mindful, and Twitch to action. Recently leadership Og even made an official statement on the club’s website, which listed all the channels of its players and asked the fans to be more careful with the fakes.

ESports streams

One of the goals of this article was to find out if e-sportsmen are using cheats. Site administrators have confirmed that some professional players actually use their services, but they refused to give specific names. As I understand it, most of these clients are players from Dota 2 and CS: GO. The wrappers are also bought by some famous Russian-language streamers Fortnite and Hearthstone with “several thousand of their live audience.” Who exactly is in question – one can only guess.

It was not possible to obtain specific information about the wrapping up in tournament broadcasts. From communication with administrators, I concluded that they either do not do this, or their capacities are not enough for a big cheat. It is possible that Russian-language studios simply do not need this, so there is no demand for such services. Theoretically, you can order bots on different sites for the same channel and eventually get several thousand fake viewers. The main questions – is it worth it and what image consequences can the publicity of such a promotion lead to?