Gaming

Twitch’s ‘Artifact’ Category Is Now Basically All Porn And Anime

The Twitch category for Artifact is like Hydra, only instead of heads it's off-topic videos and porn.

by Amanda Yeo  28 May 2019
Artifact Twitch streams

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For the past few days, the Artifact category on Twitch has been filled with streams of things that are decidedly not Valve’s virtual card game. There have been entire films and television marathons. There have been gifs, memes and men reading Dune to their Tamagotchis. And, of course, there has been porn.

Based on the incredibly successful Dota 2, Artifact was released on November 28 to general disinterest. Tempting neither Dota 2 players nor Hearthstone players, initial curiosity toward the game quickly transformed into apathy or outright disdain.

By January the average number of Artifact players had dropped by 75 percent. By April, the average was just over 180. Dota 2 attracted an average of over 520,000 players that same month.

However, for the past few days people have been flocking to the Artifact category on video game streaming platform Twitch. Sadly for Valve, this is not due to sudden interest in the largely abandoned game. Rather, players have been using the category to stream whatever random crap they can come up with — including quite a bit of porn.

According to Dot Esports, the chaos seems to have begun after user hip_digi broadcast a novelty stream under the Artifact category, hoping to catch the attention of Twitch streamer NymN.

NymN, who has over 110,000 followers, had apparently made a habit of checking Artifact‘s Twitch category during his streams to marvel at the barren wasteland. However, when he checked it early on May 18, he found a single image of a man holding an audio Bible, accompanied by the text, “Daily quest: Get NymN to click this link twice.”

In the days since, the number of Twitch broadcasts in the Artifact category has increased dramatically, with only a small handful actually belonging there. It’s become a churning, ever-changing pile of anime, infomercials, documentaries, memes, dancing, games that are not Artifact, and porn.

A few streamers are making token efforts to avoid being banned from Twitch, such as putting actual Artifact gameplay in the corner of their Little Witch Academia stream, or claiming that they’re only playing Overwatch while waiting to find an opponent in Artifact. But largely, people have just been doing whatever the hell they want, daring Twitch to bring out the bans.

It hasn’t all been fun and games, though. Esports reporter Rod Breslau noted yesterday that one Twitch user streamed footage from the Christchurch shootings for 30 minutes before the broadcast was taken down.

Twitch appears to have gotten better at NSFW wack-a-mole, as I’ve seen a couple of porn streams go up and quickly come down today. A few safe for work videos also seem to have been removed.

Nevertheless, the Artifact category currently remains overrun, with new off-topic videos popping up as quickly as old ones are taken down. It’s like Hydra, only instead of heads, it’s random anime and porn.