Dr Disrespect Announces twitch ban during his YouTube Return Stream

This article was last updated on 8/8/20.

The man can generate hype, I’ll give him that. After a mysterious disappearance that lasted more than a month, Dr Disrespect has returned to streaming on YouTube today, his seemingly new home after his permanent ban on Twitch.

Yesterday afternoon, Doc started running a static stream, and after the first hour or so it turned out that he would be back today at 3 PM ET. Well, that was shot to 4 PM, and now he’s actually live for over 500,000 viewers at the time of this writing and no, of course he has no concrete answers for us about his famous Twitch ban. He handled the ban, saying he still has no idea why Twitch banned him, and that he can not think of anything he would have done to justify the ban. This remains difficult to believe, and yet Doc pushed back critics who did not believe this line about the ban, calling it a ‘cockroach approach’ to speculating about what happened. The “last thing” he said he would say about it was “let the legal professionals do what they have to do, that’s it.”

Quite literally, there has been nothing leaked about Doc’s Twitch ban in the last month. Not from him, Twitch or from inside sources. Twitch abruptly terminated a recently signed, multi-million dollar contract with Dr. Disrespect, months after the deal was made, and gave no reason for this, only to say that all creators are subject to the same rules, despite their size. Dr Disrespect maintained that he was not told why he was banned, and managed to get through many major interviews that revealed absolutely nothing about what happened in a PR-sanitized tour, where he kept saying that he could not talk about what was going on for legal reasons with Twitch.

What legal reasons? That remains unclear. Maybe more obscure than ever, now. First, given that Doc’s ban came directly after a wave of #MeToo allegations in the gaming sector, many of which led to Twitch connections, the logical leap was that perhaps something of that nature, and / or something criminal , would go behind the scenes.

But there were no public accusations ever made against Doc. He has not been arrested or charged with anything in the last month. That now he is essentially making a “comeback” of something that … no one knows the details of. It’s a very strange situation. This is, of course, the type of speculation that Doc has opposed, and yet has not offered any plausible theories of his own about the ban, and is now content to remain silent and lawyers work it out.

It feels a little strange to see such massive support for Doc’s return without ever gaining clarity about the Twitch situation. The line among his fans seems to be that since nothing bad came out, there is no reason net to support him, and they assume that Twitch just screwed him up in some way, and whatever ‘legal’ issues there are, they should be contractual, not criminal. It’s possible, but it’s probably too soon to settle everything, even if it’s been over a month now.

So, here’s the comeback, which does not involve Doc signing a new contract, but instead just streaming to YouTube without some sort of high dollar deal, just to … stream. And of course, he can earn money anyway and has already subscribed to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in subscriptions and donations for the reason for his return and now the proceeds themselves. Since we do not know what he did to ban Twitch, we have no idea if that same thing could end up being banned on YouTube, but he certainly does not think so, hence all the hype and set-up for this big comeback.

It really is one of the most confusing mysteries in gaming. I used to have little interest in Doc, but this situation has been just so confusing that it’s hard not to get involved in the mystery of it all. In this sector, the truth is has got to leak out at some point about what happened here, but I’m genuinely puzzled that it is not already, so who knows.

It turns out that YouTube is primarily Doc’s new home, with or without a contract, and sources say that no deals from YT or other streaming services are difficult, and yet he is free to stream anywhere else as everyone would normally be. Even if Doc returns to normal streaming, it’s a changed situation. He does not have permission to stream with any of his old Twitch buddies (part of the nature of a ban), and yet he can continue to create content on YouTube unless a new ban takes effect. And because we do not know what caused the latter, it is not possible to say what will happen next.

If you want to be one of the hundreds of thousands of people watching Doc’s return, you can watch his comeback stream here. This story is not over, and if anything, it only gets more enchanting then the longer answers remain out of sight.

Update: 8/8/20

Now that the dust has settled, we can sort through some impressive numbers for Doc’s return stream, and his recent growth on YouTube now that it appears it’s going to be his most important (and only) platform of choice.

At its peak, Doc’s return stream brought in about 510,000 viewers at a time, dwarfing the likes of Ninja’s YouTube stream following the mixer’s shutdown, which was more than 130,000. But Ninja did not have the big air of mystery around his departure from his old platform, and many, many viewers stood in to see Doc explain the reason for his Twitch ban, and the end result was that he maintained that he did not knew.

Since Doc started posting a streaming return on YouTube, his subs have been inflated. Since the move became clear, Doc has raised about 500,000 subscribers in the last 48-72 hours, currently taking up to 2.25 million. Again impressive as it is seen against Ninja, who has a built-in 24 million subscribers at baseline, but his streaming debut was a quarter of Doc’s.

Doc’s first stream back reached 7.2 million viewers, though that covers the long time where it was just a loading screen.

The real test will be when Doc returns with stream with regularity, which seems to be difficult. I would imagine that he will still draw large numbers, but that total of 500K is probably not repeated, nor anything remotely nearby, which triggers a major news event. Again, Doc does not seem to have signed any deal with YouTube, and unlike Ninja’s return, which was just flexing his muscle for contract negotiations (which he later did with a Twitch stream), Doc just tries to get back to streaming regularly. Whatever happens to his Twitch ban will probably mean he can not sign a new contract until it is resolved, so whatever money he makes will be more traditional means, donations, paid subs, merchandise, advertising revenue, it ordinary. And that should be enough.

More to get into this saga, no doubt. Stay tuned.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube en Instagram. Picking up my sci-fi novels Herokiller en Herokiller 2, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.