Twitch Rivals Bloodless Battle: How a charity event for a good cause turned into a sweaty pro tourney
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Hemophilia is a serious blood disorder. When most people get a cut, our blood clots, stopping the bleeding so that we don’t die. People who suffer from hemophilia have blood that doesn’t clot easily, which can (and does) lead to deadly situations, making the average hemophiliac twice as likely as a healthy person to die at any given time, while those with severe hemophilia are at even greater risk.
Is this news to you? I’d forgive you for not learning any of that, even if you did watch Twitch Rivals: Bloodless Battle, a charity event meant to promote hemophilia awareness and the tight-knit community of hemophiliac streamers.
“Today is all about spotlighting those members within the Twitch community, bringing them together, and showing off their skills,” declared the announcer, WavePunk.
At least, that’s what it was meant to be.
Instead, competitive Apex got a surprise pro tournament. The $50,000 prize pool, five times the size of a ‘regular season’ ALGS tournament in NA and almost 70% larger than the already substantial PGL Showdown, all but guaranteed that Bloodless Battle was going to be a fierce competition—a treat for Apex fans, to be sure, but a bit baffling from the charitable perspective.
How this was meant to promote hemophilia awareness in any significant way was unclear. The official stream featured a magician/comedian hybrid act, and while two of the twenty invited teams had hemophiliacs on the roster, they were new to Apex, and had zero impact on the tournament—outside of offering themselves up as free kill points to stronger teams.
Albralelie captained a squad filled out by two-thirds of CLG’s pro roster and finished with 102 points, while TSM played with their entire competitive roster intact. The bottom few teams struggled to put any kills or points on the board at all—making them sitting ducks for hungry pros.
Popular Apex streamer Babynikki started a conversation among pros and streamers about Bloodless Battle on Twitter when she pointed out the disconnect between this event’s aims and its execution:
The prominent female player Janey suggested that teams should be made up of only 1 pro and 2 content creators. But given the collapse of a clear distinction between content creators and competitive players in Apex, that seemed like it would be a difficult rule to fairly enforce.
Of course, the awkward skill difference between pro players and those invited as charity streamers or content creators wasn’t exactly a surprise. Even random redditors saw this coming. But Cloudfuel, the tournament organizer, defended the format:
NRG’s Apex content creator Rogue brought up that the scene isn’t exactly packed with these kinds of opportunities for pros, and how ultimately it didn’t matter how they were packaged:
Simply put, the players who struggled in these lobbies didn’t have a great time:
To add insult to injury, the teams that were invited because of their connection to hemophilia were prohibited from earning money. Even if they had, by a miracle, finished in the top ten, they couldn’t take a nickel of it.
I spoke to one of the invitees to the event via Twitter DMs (who asked not to be identified) about whether Bloodless Battle did enough to raise hemophilia awareness. Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
“I do think it could've been handled a bit better to give more attention and awareness to Hemophilia vs. how it went down,” they wrote. “I do understand throwing us into that almost-pro tournament of players and Rivals being already established in that area, that it would be tricky. I think the commentators… handled the interviews and such pretty well, although I do feel like most of the players literally had no clue why we were there, and to be honest we seemed more like free points they could target lol.”
That said, they praised Twitch Rivals and Genentech, a biotechnology company that manufactures pharmaceuticals and sponsored the event, for doing what they could.
“I personally knew which way it was going to go as soon as I saw the pro players and money attached to it, especially since we weren't able to claim any winnings if we did do better. Despite that, I was there to see it play out in hopes that we get the ball rolling on future awareness events, for not only Hemophilia, but anything else as well.”
Utimately, Bloodless Battle seemed to promote Apex much more effectively than hemophilia, peaking at more than 48,000 viewers. For the sake of comparison, the Summer Circuit Playoffs for North and South America combined had a peak of 11,000 viewers—proving that Twitch Rivals, despite its problems, did a great job raising awareness about competitive Apex.
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For those of you who subscribe, look for an update later this week discussing the results of the cross-region grudge match of EU vs. NA in the finals of Realm’s Summit Series, and a big preview of this weekend’s Autumn Circuit Playoffs.