The return of r/Place on Reddit has been huge in the gaming world, with various communities fighting for a piece of the composite virtual image. The battle has now become bigger than ever thanks to popular streamers like Felix “xQc” Lengyel getting in on the action.
Place was originally created in 2017 as an April Fools’ Day activity by Reddit. The original Place experiment lasted for 72 hours, with 1 million users taking part by placing tiles on the canvas. Only one tile can be changed at a time, meaning communities must work together to create images without disruption from others.
xQc had his massive online community behind him, allowing him to take up a very large portion of the canvas. But things didn’t go exactly as planned.
xQc and his community started working quickly to give him a special spot on Reddit Place’s canvas. With 10 million Twitch followers and a legion of live viewers, xQc was easily able to leave his mark, but Reddit didn’t keep it up for long.
xQc and his fans created a women’s butt in honor of the controversial streamer. Reddit deemed this drawing inappropriate and it was quickly censored. In its place, Reddit left a black shaded area.
xQc was disappointed by this turn of events, encouraging his viewers to bring the “booty” back to r/Place. The dramatic fight to put the butt back on the canvas reached past xQc’s fans, increasing xQc’s viewers during the Reddit Place stream.
Peak viewership during xQc’s “Dominating r/Place” stream was over 233,000 viewers. This beat xQc’s previous viewership record of 220,720 in 2020 by more than 10,000. The previous peak viewership was due to Valorant beta key drops. xQc also had strong viewership recently for his reality show reaction streams.
The Reddit Place war has stretched beyond niche circles with many big-name streamers getting involved. This has led to different contingents having “wars” on the canvas and negotiations for select portions of the space, with big streamers using their massive following to secure a spot.
Not everyone has liked xQc using his large fanbase to grab such a big space on the canvas. xQc faced a lot of backlash from within the gaming community, many of who voiced concern that he was taking over the project.
“I just enjoy doing it. I think it’s fun to make things kind of different. I think it’s fun. It makes everybody feel something and it made people rebuild and build s—,” xQc said.
xQc did apologize on behalf of himself and his audience to anyone that had potentially felt hurt by his community’s surge.
“I thought this was just a canvas for fun on a fun website,” xQc said.
This was unfortunately not enough for some. xQc reported that he was getting an abundance of death threats after the Reddit Place stunt.
“I have gotten more death threats in an hour than I have gotten in the past six years combined from changing pixels from one color to another on a corporate website that makes your f—— lights flash on your monitor,” xQc said on stream.
xQc called the intense reaction an “illness,” clearly frustrated with the extreme negative response from some to his Reddit Place stream.
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