Artifact’s lasting legacy may be as the place for pirate Twitch streams.
Credit: Valve
Valve’s failed card game Artifact became infamous back in 2019 when its section on Twitch was filled with illegal movie streams and at times much worse . Now, four years later, the same thing is still happening, with blockbuster movies and constant reruns of South Park live right now on Twitch.
Over the past few days, there have been a number of different streams pumping out copyrighted content to hundreds of viewers. The most popular was a channel that was showing a constant stream of modern South Park episodes, with the stream title North Park, that at times had upwards of 600 viewers. Other TV shows have also been on repeat, with the likes of Game of Thrones, House and The Simsons all being shown on different channels over recent days.
There have also been a lot of blockbuster movies shown. A Harry Potter marathon took place showing all of the franchise’s films, while the likes of Johnny English Strikes Again, RocknRolla and World War Z have all been shown posing as Artifact streams. At the time of writing Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Spider-Man 3 are the films of choice.
In some of the streams, viewers ask what DLC is up next to find out the running order for the day, presumably in an attempt to not trigger any auto alerts when it comes to discussing the movies being streamed.
Obviously, all of these streams go against Twitch’s terms of service, and every so often one of the streams will go down with the account being banned. However, it doesn’t usually take long for another to pop up in the Artifact section once again and most of these streams will stay up for hours if not longer. In fact, one stream was banned as I was writing this article, it was back up and running with the same branding, just a different username, and the same TV show within 15 minutes.
Over the past four days when I have been checking in on the Artifact section on Twitch, I have only seen two people actually stream any Artifact, both of whom only had one viewer at the time. However, given that at the time of writing there are only 35 players in the world on both Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry, it isn’t a surprise that there isn’t much appetite for Artifact streams.
Considering how many streams are live at any one time on Twitch, making sure that all streams conform to the ToS is an impossible task. But given that at least half of the streams in the Artifact section are blatantly streaming copyrighted content at any one time, it would be a good idea for a Twitch content moderator to just bookmark the Artifact section and check in every few hours.