shroud streams Valorant to 500K viewers in Twitch return

Nick J. August 12, 2020

Michael "shroud" Grzesiek's return to Twitch made history for the streamer as he passed 500,000 concurrent viewers within minutes of turning on his camera.

Viewers poured into the Twitch channel by the thousands. While the chat was quickly placed in followers-only mode, donations and gifted subscriptions poured in for almost 45 minutes before shroud even appeared on camera. But as the man himself appeared back on the streaming platform after many months away, it was as though he had never left. After booting up Valorant, shroud surpassed the 500,000 concurrent viewer mark before he had even entered the practice range.

Soon after, shroud revealed that he had already hit 22,000 subscribers in his first day back on Twitch.

Welcome back to #twitch idk if anyone has a better picture but your comeback was Insane 516k active viewers pic.twitter.com/malJSjsWN2
— Serg (@RealMaleficer) August 12, 2020

shroud's triumphant return to Twitch came after the former Mixer streamer released a short teaser earlier in the week revealing that shroud had chosen Twitch as his streaming platform of choice following Mixer's untimely demise earlier this summer. While rumors of a multi-million dollar Facebook Gaming deal and a potential YouTube Gaming partnership swirled, shroud took several weeks after Mixer's shutdown to make his next move, which was a return to Twitch.

"I don't deserve this," shroud said of his 500,000 concurrent views.

According to counters on his stream at the time of publishing, viewers had donated over 2,864 subs, as well as several thousand more resubscriptions that continued to appear in chat with over 71,300 bits cheered after only 45 minutes of play.

shroud also revealed the games he'll be playing in the coming weeks, including Valorant, Escape from Tarkov, and DayZ.

Notable CSGO pros show up among shroud's Valorant friends

shroud, a former CSGO pro player himself, gave fans a glimpse at just who he gamed with while scrolling through his friends list in Valorant, with such names as fellow former CSGO pros Spencer "HiKo" Martin and Rory "dephh" Jackson on shroud's Riot profile sidebar. But it was former CSGO player Justin "Just9n" Ortiz who wound up showing off in shroud's first stream back. After shroud had sidestepped into a double spray down, just9n came through with the four-kill post-plant clutch.

All of this in only shroud's first day back on the job. Who knows what heights shroud might reach once he's had a few days to settle back into his home on Twitch.