Twitch streamer PirateSoftware landed himself in trouble after accidentally exposing his own plot to artificially inflate a hypetrain record attempt. During a recent broadcast, Thor (known as PirateSoftware) inadvertently revealed Discord messages showing coordination with his head moderator Khronos to extend a hypetrain using both the mod’s main account and an alternate account.
The exposed messages showed clear instructions from PirateSoftware to Khronos, who is a paid employee of the channel, on how to maximize the hypetrain’s longevity using strategically timed bits and subscription purchases. The plan included using an alt account to make donations appear as though they were coming from an ordinary fan rather than from a channel moderator.
To make the deception more convincing, the alt account sent a text-to-speech donation with a message falsely claiming to be a friend of Khronos while praising PirateSoftware. When this donation appeared on stream, Jason pretended not to know the source despite being directly informed about it in the Discord messages.
Hypetrains are community events on Twitch that trigger when viewers collectively send subscriptions or bits within a short timeframe. They create a visible progress bar that can unlock special emotes and potentially increase a channel’s visibility on the platform. PirateSoftware was attempting to break a record previously held by another streamer named Vedal.
The leaked messages also revealed discussions about maximizing profits, with mentions that using bits provides an “82% return” for the streamer after Twitch takes its cut. There were also references to “clearing the queue” of donation messages that might otherwise be redirected to charity if not played during the stream.
After all this went down, PirateSoftware deleted the broadcast recordings from both this attempt and a previous year’s similar record attempt. The official reason given was to protect donors from potential harassment, but many speculate it was to limit scrutiny of the questionable tactics.
What happened might break Twitch’s Terms of Service, especially if the donations weren’t transparently disclosed when their intent was to inflate engagement for profit or exposure. People are also asking if Khronos was reimbursed for these donations, which would make things even more serious.
PirateSoftware, who is also the lead developer of indie game Heartbound, has issued statements downplaying what happened. He insisted no rules were broken because moderators “often support” channels and denied direct reimbursement for the donations.
