About a fortnight ago, Guy Beahm, better known as popular live streamer Dr Disrespect, had reached an agreement with Twitch. He was permanently suspended in June 2020 for unknown reasons before launching legal action over the ban; unfortunately, the resolution provided no insight into why it was imposed.
“I have resolved my legal dispute with Twitch,” Dr Disrespect said in a Twitter message. “None of the parties admits to any wrongdoing.”
“Moving on” was clearly doing a lot of heavy lifting for both parties, because Twitch has suspended Chess Grandmaster and five-time US champion Hikaru Nakamura for watching Dr Disrespect play chess. On March 16, Nakamura streamed himself on Twitch while watching Dr Disrespect play against Dr Lupo.
It’s a little strange that a Chess Grandmaster has been suspended by Twitch for streaming Dr Disrespect playing chess, but that’s the world we live in, and from the streaming platform’s perspective, it’s as simple as it gets. Twitch wants streamers to know not to mess around and try to get Dr Disrespect on-stream in cute ways, or their own status will be jeopardised.
Nakamura has a habit of doing more accessible chess videos than the average chess streamer, and during the stream, he says some rather unkind things about Dr Disrespect’s game. It turns out that the most ruthless competitor in videogame history is a terrible chess player.
Dr. Disrespect has done well on YouTube in the past. Of course, he has 3.82 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and his own game development studio, Midnight Society. Unfortunately, the main product is selling NFT beta access to games that do not yet exist.
