Soulja Boy is never shy about making bold claims, but the latest is that he made Twitch popular. We’ve talked about Soulja Boy a few times here in the past, such as his claim that he’s part-owner of Atari or his foray into esports. But in a recent claim, DeAndre “Soula Boy” Way is the reason that we all have Twitch is so popular now. He has admittedly been around Twitch over the past few years, but does it mean that he’s the reason we’ve got Ninja, xQc, Pokimane, and more? Is he the reason we’ve got Dr Disrespect now – even though he’s on Youtube? Something about it doesn’t quite hold water.

Soulja Boy is probably best known for Crank That (Soulja Boy) back in 2007. That said, he has been active in the Twitch scene in the last few years. There are some titanic names in streaming that are critical when it comes to Twitch – Dr Disrespect, Ninja, DrLupo, TFue, Shroud, Myth. Now, we aren’t knocking Souljaboy’s 821,979 followers, which is no mean feat. Especially when you consider he started regularly streaming in 2020. He had been on Twitch previously, but it was sporadic at best.

In a recent stream, Soulja Boy claims he’s the reason Twitch is popular:

“I was the first rapper on Twitch, back when it used to be called Justin.tv. I’m the one that made it cool for you to be playing Xbox [and] games on Twitch. Subscribers, going live. I did that. That was all me bro. You know what I’m saying? Everything… I done did it!”

It’s entirely possible that Soulja Boy was on Justin.tv too, we aren’t discrediting that. Between this, he also claimed he was the first rapper in the esports game, and that esports started in 2010. His gaming team, SODMG Gamers started in 2004, according to Soulja Boy. But if you want to get nice and technical, the first esports event was a competition, “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” in 1972. So he’s maybe a bit behind on the curve there.

Twitch is overwhelmingly popular now, more than ever. There’s no disputing that, but there are channels that absolutely dwarf his presence on the site. According to TwitchTracker, more than 1066 billion minutes of content have been consumed this year. Soulja Boy is still popular in both rap and on Twitch, and his 5m Twitch views is a major number. That’s a drop in the bucket for someone like xQc though, who clocks in at 416M Twitch views, over the same length of time SouljaBoy’s been on Twitch.

So maybe he’s not the biggest name on Twitch, but perhaps he did help pave the way for us on Twitch, back in the Justin.tv days. It is certainly a bold claim, and a fun story to tell. Maybe he’s not the sole reason, but if he did really play his part in those days, thank you, Soulja Boy, for making Twitch so popular.