For 31 days, Ludwig Ahgren’s stream has been up and running all day every day. He hasn’t been awake the entire time, but he and his moderators have ensured that it’s grown to be one of Twitch’s most consistent and comforting presences — albeit one that is probably taking a not-insignificant mental and physical toll on everyone involved. Since the beginning, a timer has been counting down to zero, but every time somebody kicks in a subscription, ten seconds get added to the clock. Now Ahgren has more subscriptions than anybody else in Twitch history.
He officially broke the record today on stream. Previously, Twitch turned Mixer turned Twitch again megastar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins held the record with 269,154 subscriptions — a feat he accomplished at the height of his relevance back in 2018. As of this publishing, Ahgren had over 271,000 subscriptions.
“There it is! You were here,” Ahgren said as his subscription counter passed Blevins’ record. “This is the new record on Twitch for most subscribers all time. Holy shit, that was insane.”
He proceeded to call a “friend,” who turned out to be Blevins. Except it wasn’t Blevins at all — instead, it was a soundboard of voice clips, which Ahgren used to make it sound like Blevins reacted by being comically mean to him. It was a good bit.
On Twitter, the real Blevins congratulated Ahgren.
“Records are meant to be broken,” Blevins wrote. “I would be lying if I said [I] wasn’t a little sad, but congrats [Ludwig] on holding the new sub record on Twitch.”
Today is the final day of Ahgren’s subscription marathon. He decided to set a cutoff date because otherwise it might have gone on indefinitely. Initially, he didn’t expect it to last anywhere near this long, nor did he plan to pass Peak Ninja in the marathon that is life. That said, Ahgren had a lot of factors working in his favour. He began the subathon as an already wealthy Twitch star, with success begetting additional success, a New York Times article, and all sorts of additional coverage and discourse.
Today in particular was a special day; on top of the standard rules underpinning Ahgren’s subathon — which has become such a fixture that everyone on Twitch knows about it — he advertised the final day as a charity subscription drive with the stated goal of beating Blevins’ record. Until 9 PM PST, he’s donating $US5 ($7) per subscription to The Humane Society and St Jude’s. This outcome, then, is far from unexpected.
Still, it’s a heck of a record, especially considering that no one aside from Blevins has even come close (the streamer in third place, RanbooLive, topped out at 114,387 in March). This from a man who nearly lost a fight to a refrigerator just a couple weeks ago. Truly, a comeback tale for the ages.
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