How did Jynxzi get the most Twitch subscribers? He streamed for years with almost no viewers.

Nicholas Stewart had an incredible year in 2023. The streamer known as Jynxzi overtook Kai Cenat‘s record by attracting more than 100,000 active Twitch subscribers. He also inked sponsorship deals and signed with management firm Right Click Culture for representation in all areas.

No matter how you slice it, Jynxzi is one of the biggest names in the Twitch world, but that wasn’t always the case. Before Stewart emerged as the most famous Rainbow Six Siege player on the internet, he languished for years in almost total obscurity.

Stewart began streaming consistently in 2019, but his efforts didn’t move the needle for years. Dexerto, citing data from Sully Gnome, noted that the Jynxzi account averaged one viewer per stream in 2019. In the following years, his audience increased somewhat, but he didn’t really take off until 2023. At the start of the year, Stewart’s peak monthly Twitch viewership hovered around 5,000 concurrents. By the time 2024 rolled around, that number regularly eclipsed 100,000.

So, if you’re keeping track at home, Stewart streamed for four years before he ever came anywhere close to the Twitch record books. His long road to a profitable career is a perfect example of the grind that comes with the creator lifestyle.

This phenomenon isn’t exactly new. More than a decade ago, in 2010, an obscure gamer from Sweden started uploading YouTube videos almost every day. He kept up that streak for years but still couldn’t break into the YouTube elite. Finally, in 2013, Felix  Kjellberg — a.k.a. PewDiePie — became YouTube’s most-subscribed gamer. The rest is history (at least in our neck of the woods).

One hopes that Stewart’s streaming career will not be as tumultuous as Kjellberg’s, but the future of Jynxzi has yet to be written. Stewart put in years of work to reach the Twitch summit; now, we get to see what he does with the opportunity he created for himself.