(Written on Dec 21 2020)

Longtime chess stream supporter Nikola Stojsin made a short farewell stream today. After his third attempt to get Twitch Partner he's fed up with the process and is leaving forever, or at least until there are fundamental changes in Twitch. This means that he won't be funding lots of various streamer chess matches and events and in general gift giving to the tune of $200k per year.

He has his client-facing statistics of the numbers he's been pulling and at face value they satisfy Twitch Partner requirements. But if he looked around he'd have realized that those requirements numbers are out of date and although not public from experience people speculate that you need to pull in far higher numbers to be made partner (unless there are other considerations). He also compared the process as being very opaque and much like the Communist government he grew up with, though here again I think most big companies B-to-B companies (and I think Twitch - Twitch Partner relationship is more B-to-B than B-to-C) have processes that are hard to fathom.

I did not realize what he was trying to do with setting up a Twitch channel and promoting Open Field Media. Perhaps, even though he owns an IT company, the way he was going about bringing corporate sponsorship to chess events was a bit too old fashioned. Streamers work on getting their own sponsorships, they shouldn't depend on a third party to bring them sponsorships as a sort of goodwill gesture (versus hiring a manager who can get you sponsorships but then you're paying a manager to do that).

It is sad to see him go, though a bit weird to leave in a "I'm taking my ball home" way.