DouyuTV is in dire trouble after last week’s exposure of their “tiered treatment” methods and withheld payments antics towards their streamers. It has been confirmed that at this moment, about half of their most popular streamers have already flocked to the rival streaming platform, Longzhu. This incident sparks the strongest shock in the streaming industry to date.

Top 20 DouyuTV streamers ranking according to a recent statistic released by iresearch.cn:

This massive switch to another platform could be due to DouyuTV’s deduction of streamer salaries, oppressive treatment of their streamers, and other reasons. Evidently, DouyuTV’s poor treatment of their streamers was revealed further by a few famous personalities and through the recent exposure of their “tiered treatment” methods.

It hasn’t been two years since the bloom of the video game streaming industry. In an industry that hasn’t fully matured, the credibility of streaming platforms is of utmost importance.  Compared to DouyuTV, Longzhu has never had any negative news surrounding them.

Aside from this, stats have shown that Longzhu co-hosted about 6 national esports events to date. This not only immersed the streaming platform with the esports culture, but also due to the fact that many famous esports personalities already reside in Longzhu, and the site can handle a large volume of viewers, it is not difficult to explain why so many streamers broke their contracts and switched Longzhu. This time, Longzhu attracted many top level streamers and brought forth a fundamental change within the streaming industry.

Aside from a few well-known streamers, there are about 10 other popular streamers total that all switched to the Longzhu streaming platform. According to iresearch.cn, 62% of DouyuTV’s total traffic comes from League of Legends. Losing more than half of their top LoL streamers is a tremendous blow to DouyuTV. This incident will not only affect the two streaming platforms, but also the entire industry.

This is a translation of an article for Chinese League of Legends site lol.uu9 that was translated by Steven Yu. The original interview can be found here.