A top game streamer’s apology hits some familiar (and unfamiliar) notes
“I think I’ve been slowly devolving into the most mean-spirited… rude, nasty, just callous psychopathic version of myself.”
“I’m ruining my life,” gaming streamer Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt told his nearly three million YouTube subscribers yesterday.
He said that in a widely-viewed video that served as both an apology for his recent comments about Palestinians and a self-critique of his voluminous and increasingly negative streaming output.
Just two days earlier, he’d been speaking about the estimated 41,000 or more Palestinians killed by the Israeli military since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis.
“No, I’m not going to cry a fucking river when people who have genocide baked into their laws are getting genocided,” he had said during one of his popular Twitch streams. “No, I don’t feel bad for them,” he had said. “I don’t feel sorry for them. I don’t care. I don’t support them.”
Two days later, Hoyt apologized—“I said something about it that was disgusting. I said that I didn’t care about innocent people getting killed by another force”—and parted ways with several business partners, including influencer group OTK, PC maker Starforge and game publisher Mad Mushroom.
The Hoyt fiasco was a familiar sequence of events in the world of gaming on Twitch and YouTube:
Streamer says or does something offensive (it happens with a lot of them)
Streamer is punished
Streamer loses business deals
Streamer is defiant or apologizes ← Hoyt is here
Streamer eventually returns to a still-massive audience.
That cycle happened just this past June when one of YouTube’s biggest gaming streamers, Guy “Dr. Disrespect” Beahm, admitted he’d been “stupid” years earlier for engaging in chat messages with a minor that “leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate.” Those actions had resulted in a lifetime ban from Twitch, a lawsuit from Beahm and eventually a settlement. After Beam’s June statement, he was dropped from his gaming company, Midnight Society, and lost his sponsorship with headphone-maker Turtle Beach. (The site Aftermath accurately predicted that he’d soon be big on YouTube again.)
The cycle also played out in 2023, after popular streamer Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff reacted to an anti-LGBT protest by saying that gay pride supporters should “leave little children alone.” Activision, which had recently added the ability for players to appear as Kolcheff in Call of Duty, swiftly dropped him from the game. (Kolcheff, who was suspended from Twitch last year after using a transphobic slur, joined the criticism of Hoyt this week, citing positive experiences he’d had with Palestinian-Americans while growing up in Michigan).
An “unhealthy” approach
What was newer in Hoyt’s apology was his self-assessment that streaming had become an obsession that had changed both him and the way he treated others, for the worse.
“I think this has been going on for, like, two years,” he said. “I think I’ve been slowly devolving into the most mean-spirited… rude, nasty, just callous psychopathic version of myself.”
He added: “A lot of my friends have told me this. My dad has told me this.”
Being held accountable for his anti-Palestinian comments had broken through to him, he said, crediting people with relatives in Palestine who’d reached out to talk (“How humiliating is that,” he said. “And these were the people I was trying to say were bad.”)
Hoyt has been streaming games for over a decade and first gained a following for playing World of Warcraft on Twitch. He’s drawn millions of viewers and, over time, extended his output.
His main YouTube channel alone, which houses segments from his streams, is a testament to a life spent perpetually talking to the camera about whatever is on his screen: generally at least four videos a day—30 minutes long, an hour long, longer—reacting to other people’s videos, lamenting the state of AAA games, and returning frequently to 2024’s grievance-rallying topic: the supposed negative influence of “DEI” on gaming.
In his apology video, Hoyt didn’t say much about the content of his videos nor his choice of topics but said the relentless pace of making them was ruining him.
A decade ago, he said, streaming was a fairly small part of his life. “Now, I would say that my life and streaming are basically the exact same size.” It had become, he said, “my entire existence.”
“I think that the process of that has been extremely unhealthy for me. And I think that what it’s done is that it’s allowed me to become such a one-dimensional person that I’m not even a person any more…”
The obsession with streaming had made him nastier, he noticed. “I feel like the main times that I laugh on my stream nowadays are when I’m laughing at other people,” he said. “And I look back on videos that I did from 2020, 2016 and 2017 and, yeah, I’ve always been an asshole, but, holy shit, I’ve been way more of an asshole. It’s just insane. It’s a night and day difference.”
In his new video Hoyt pledges to cut down on streaming a little and, among other things, clean his house. (Just two weeks prior, he’d posted a video acknowledging that he had dead animals in his home and shared stories about his troubled childhood.)
He also said yesterday that he wants to apologize in a future stream to some people he’s wronged in his videos.
Hoyt didn’t say who he meant, though at least one person he has repeatedly mentioned when talking about the DEI topic has said that those mentions have triggered his fan base into harassment.
Hours later, on a subreddit focused on him, he explained to his fans why he apologized.
“Don't let yourself become ideologically captured by a world view to the point where it makes you so unreasonable that you turn into what you're fighting against,” he wrote.
Lest people get the wrong idea about how much he planned to change with his less angry approach, he also assured his fans that he wasn’t going to be “playing Dustborn and promoting Sweet Baby,” references to two common and frequently-harassed targets of the anti-”woke” games crowd.
To further put his followers at ease, he added in a reply: “Don't worry, I'll react to a DEI=DIE gaming video first day back to stream.”
Item 2: In brief…
🎮 French studio Don’t Nod will lay off as many as 69 workers as part of a reorganization following the underperformance of two well-reviewed games, the mountain-climbing adventure Jusant and the third-person ghost-hunting game Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, IGN reports.
📈 Space Marine II has been played by 4.5 million unique users, publisher Focus Entertainment announced this week, as parent company Pullup Entertainment reported surging second-quarter revenue (€200 million/$217 million vs. €46 million/$50 million for the same quarter a year prior).
Pullup also announced the delay of two games, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando and MIO: Memories in Orbit to the 12 months starting April 2025.
Notably, Focus was the publisher of the Don’t Nod-developed Banisher and also noted the game’s under-performance in its results. (The main offices of Focus and Don’t Nod are also located in the same building in Paris.)
🎮 Riot Games is laying off workers in a new wave of cuts, following 500 job cuts earlier this year, VG247 reports.
👀 PureArts, the makers of an Assassin’s Creed Shadows statue that was promoted last month and included a one-legged Torii gate reminiscent of one damaged in the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, has apologized and pulled the statue from sale due to its “insensitive design,” IGN reports.
💰 Microsoft has removed the option to sign up for a 14-day Xbox Game Pass trial subscription for $1, just a week ahead of the next Call of Duty’s debut on the service, Dexerto reports.
💡 Remedy (Alan Wake, Max Payne) has revealed the studio’s first multiplayer game, a three-player co-op shooter called FBC: Firebreak that is a spin-off from its game Control, slated for a 2025 release on PC, PS5 and Xbox
In an unusual move, it will launch on day one into Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus’ Extra and Premium tiers, which should help it find a sizable audience and not suffer the immediate disinterest that has befallen other premium shooters.
Also announced during an Xbox showcase today: a 2025 release window for aquatic survival game Subnautica 2, a new Bloober Team project called Cronos: The New Dawn, gameplay of a cel-shaded biking game called Wheel World (formerly called Ghost Bike). Check Eurogamer’s round-up for even more.
🤔 2K Games is making a hero shooter called Project Ethos and offering players access to playtests starting today, PC Gamer reports.
😲 Arma 4 will be released in 2027, development studio Bohemia Interactive announced today.
That’s so far into the future that there isn’t even a wikipedia page for games slated for that year (though there are at least a little over a dozen games announced for 2026)
Not sure what to make of this Asmongold thing, the dude seemed really unwell for a long time, so while this show of self-awareness might indicate character development, it's hard to take anything he says too seriously when he still seems committed to deepening the culture war divide, as per that Reddit thread he started after his apology.
Among a lot of other nonsense, he played a vocal role in changing some people's perceptions of sensitivity readers from a boring consultancy gig into this big bad that's out there to destroy your vidya. Reading the comment sections of his videos would make you think Sweet Baby Inc runs the world and isn't just one boring company in a sea of them.
But yeah, I guess he's right in thinking that making a living by keeping millions of people angry every day isn't healthy. The question is can he stop even if he wanted to? Wouldn't his current audience just move on to someone else for their anger fix?
I'm wondering: Do streamers seek help with this kind of stuff? Or employ others to support them?
Is the industry still that lean (in terms of sponsorship and partnership deals) that they can't afford it?
Compare them to other celebrities who have similar followings, where their statements lead to stories. They often have a full team behind them (for better or worse) supporting their image and managing things. Is that ever the case here?