Well-known content creator Valkyrae is returning to Twitch on February 8 after five years of exclusive streaming on competitor platform YouTube. Rachell Hofstetter, better known as Valkyrae, began streaming on Twitch in 2015 and experienced a jump in her popularity a few years later for playing Fortnite. Around this same time, she joined the gaming organization 100 Thieves and began doing livestreams with other established personalities like Pokimane, Sykkuno, and PewDiePie.
After five years growing a loyal audience on Twitch, Hofstetter announced that she had signed a two-year streaming contract with YouTube. In addition to remaining exclusive there for a set period of time, Valkyrae also had to stream on YouTube for a specific number of hours. This didn’t seem to be a problem for her, as she successfully brought her audience with her and subsequently signed two more exclusivity contracts with the Google-owned platform.
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Recently, Valkyrae revealed that she has fulfilled her third and final contract with YouTube and will be transitioning back to Twitch. Her first livestream on the purple platform will take place on her birthday, February 8, 2025. Because this will also mark her 10-year anniversary as a streamer, she will kick things off with “a special marathon announcement.” Valkyrae has been on YouTube for five years, equaling the amount of time she was originally on Twitch. She has not shared why she is choosing to leave team red for purple after all this time, nor whether she will opt to do multiplatform streams.
When Is Valkyrae Returning to Twitch?
In the responses to Valkyrae’s Twitter announcement, an interaction with fellow content creator Pokimane revealed that she may be visiting Hofstetter’s return livestream. A number of other Twitch streamers also showed up in the replies to express their excitement at the news. Though Valkyrae had chosen to remain on YouTube because she didn’t want to abandon the community that she had built there, it seems that hesitation has now passed. People tend to be loyal to the creator and not the platform, so it’s probable that many of her YouTube viewers won’t mind following her to Twitch.
But the content creator hasn’t been spending all her time livestreaming on YouTube. In 2022, Hofstetter voiced Squad Commander Red in the TV show Sonic Prime, and she also appeared as herself in Mark Wahlberg’s 2023 film The Family Plan. More recently, Valkyrae revealed that she will cameo in the upcoming A Minecraft Movie, which is due to premiere in April 2025.