Desperate JRPG fans invade Twitch, milk Honkai Star Rail's Stellar Jade giveaway so hard the devs had to pull rewards with weeks left in the event

gamesradar.com:

Honkai Star Rail, the turn-based JRPG from Genshin Impact studio Hoyoverse, announced a new Twitch "incentive plan" on September 13 as a way to get people to stream and watch the game. This turned out to be quite the hornet's nest to kick, because within just weeks the Star Rail community had milked Twitch so hard that Hoyoverse has had to disable almost all of the rewards even though the event is still scheduled to run through October 15. 

The rules for the Twitch event were fairly simple. You'd get in-game rewards for streaming Honkai Star Rail for at least one hour everyday. Additionally, milestones for streaming three days, five days, one week, two weeks, and three weeks would pay out big chunks of Stellar Jades, the currency used to pull for new characters and weapons in Star Rail's gacha system. 

The kicker is that viewership was totally optional. Even if you streamed to absolutely nobody – which most participants would since they'd not only be new streamers but also debuting in the middle of a stampede – you'd still get the daily and milestone rewards. There are extra rewards for watchtime milestones, sure, but realistically only established streamers would ever accrue enough viewership to earn them anyway. This left the door open for potentially millions of ravenous, gacha-hungry players to rack up free Stellar Jades just by loading up OBS for an hour a day, and boy did they pile in. 

Twitch Tracker illustrates just how extreme this little Twitch event was. Star Rail launched in April and saw an average of 780 concurrent streams at its height. In August, it averaged 222 active channels. This month, that jumped to a staggering 3,933 average active channels, with a peak of 18,868 – over three times the peak channel