It’s difficult enough to worry about success on Twitch when you’re a solo streaming operation. It’s a completely different scenario when you’re trying to ensure that an entire team of people can keep working.
That’s the dire situation that Kevin Pereira found himself in. A longtime fixture in the gaming community, Pereira is best known as a host of Attack of the Show!, which aired on G4 from 2005-2012. After leaving G4, he launched The Attack on Twitch in 2014. The Attack wasn’t performing the way Pereira and his production company needed it to, and the host-turned-producer-turned-boss told Polygon that with people’s jobs on the line, he was feeling desperate to try and keep the show going to keep as many people employed as possible.
Pereira ended up turning to view-botting, a practice that falsely inflates the number of viewers watching a stream or video. It’s frowned upon within the streaming community, and it violates Twitch’s terms of service. After being discovered, Pereira voluntarily took down the Twitch channel before it could get suspended.
He told Polygon earlier today that even though he knew he was doing something wrong, he did it in an effort to keep the Attack team together for however long he could. It was an act born of desperation.
“I explicitly said I had nothing left to lose and was very flippant about it and said, ‘Well, a way to get discovered on the platform is to have a channel that’s getting more views,’” Pereira said. “So instead of trying to make the content better or refocus my strategy, with the limited time we had left, I decided to shortcut it and try to get some extra views on the channel.”
