The legendary Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek returned to streaming on Twitch after a two-month-long hiatus, and with half-a-million concurrent viewers watching, his return was rather boring. Shroud’s startup screen garnered over 300k viewers who were then treated to a silent intro, bitrate issues, and thrilling round of in-game currency purchases. In Shrouds defense, he was very self-aware that his return to streaming was far less than immaculate despite clocking in a peak 517k viewers.
In October of 2019, Shroud left Twitch to stream exclusively on the now-defunct Microsoft’s Mixer. When Mixer announced in June that it would be merging with Facebook Gaming and would be closing the Mixer side of operations, Shroud jumped ship along with other large streaming personalities such as Ninja and Ewok. Shroud stayed quiet about his future until a couple of weeks ago when teaser GIFs started to appear on his Twitter. Shroud then announced, on August 11th, that he would be returning to his home streaming platform, Twitch, the following day.
Shroud went live on Twitch for the first time at 2 p.m. EST on August 12th, and the viewers, subscriptions, and donations came flooding in. His “starting soon” screen stayed up for almost an hour while the number of viewers continued to rise only to be met with Shroud’s new intro without sound. When the silent gameplay montage concluded, Shroud appeared on-screen laughing off the slight mishap and sipping his morning coffee. It was also discovered that the bitrate was set too high for Shroud’s stream which caused problems for those viewing in 720p. Shroud was clearly shocked by the number of viewers and subscriptions as he spent the next several minutes in silent awe. After chatting with his fans, Shroud jumped into a riveting round of purchasing in-game currency off-screen before playing Valorant for the next seven hours.
On any other day, this would have been exactly how Shroud’s streams would start. He even stated on stream that he couldn’t believe the amount of hype that surrounded his return because he knew he wasn’t going to do anything big or surprising. Shroud stated, “I don’t even know how many people are sitting here waiting and they were expecting something grand, something huge. When in reality, I knew exactly how it was going to go down because I know myself. I’m gonna show up, and I’m gonna play games. That’s all I’m gonna do.” And that is exactly what occurred in front of over 500k viewers. Shroud even tweeted out his stats from the stream with the caption “I pictured an epic return… not quite like this though.”
Shroud’s stream did include a few new features including a replay and zoom function which was rarely used during the stream, and a goatee which felt a little out of place. Regardless of Shroud’s lackluster return, his loyal fans were treated to the same ole streamer they’ve come to know and love. While a large number of viewers may have expected some big fancy show, Shroud averaged over 200k viewers who stuck around until the very end enjoying the content he has always produced. One thing is for sure, Shroud has finally come home, and hundreds of thousands of fans are glad to have him back.
