Who is Blaustoise? Twitch streamer
Tracing Blaustoise’s gaming career and rise as a Twitch streamer (Image via G2 Esports/Twitter)
garnering quite the attention with his recent on-stream interactions with fellow content creators and friends such as Leslie “Fuslie.” The two, in fact, got into an old clip battle, trying to embarrass each other for their old haircuts.
Starting in 2022 I’m officially going fulltime with streaming and content creation pic.twitter.com/50J3ZC4mKu
— blau (@blaustoise) January 17, 2022
Nathan quit his job as a game researcher and announced that he would be streaming full-time from January with a short clip featuring himself playing a variety of games such as GTA V, Valorant and Apex Legends. The clip was captioned thusly:
“Starting in 2022 I’m officially going fulltime with streaming and content creation.”
On August 19, the European esporting organization G2 announced that the streamer had joined their ranks as a content creator.
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Who is Blaustoise? Twitch streamer
Exploring Blaustoise’s varied career in gaming and streaming
Personal bio and professional career in game development
30-year-old Nathan Blau is an American Twitch streamer based out of Los Angeles, California. A University of Chicago alum, Blau has a double bachelor’s degree in Psychology with an emphasis on Social Neuroscience and Political Science. According to his LinkedIn, he was also on the college’s Starcraft II team.
After graduating in 2014, he went on to work at PlayStation, first as an intern and then full-time as an Associate User Researcher. But his online fame came when he joined Riot in 2015 as a Researcher and Strategist on R&D. Focusing on Riot’s MOBA League of Legends, he was responsible for player data research and analysis.
In a 2018 interview, he described his role as:
“What I do is I gather data, whether it be sentiment data from surveys. Or behavioral data from winrates and playrates of champions. And I use that information to help inform our designers and out product teams.”
He became increasingly active in the League of Legends community with his online presence and interest in the game’s content. He began streaming around the same time and gained a dedicated fan base who loved his insight into the game.
In January 2021, Blaustoise announced his departure from Riot Games and in a public statement gave a shoutout to the streaming community where he had made quite the splash with his Valorant and Among Us gameplay, hinting at but not yet committing towards a proper streaming career:
“From the VALORANT 5-stacks, to the Among Us lobbies, to Team Rocket and J10 in Rust, I met so many content creators who quickly became my friends. It feels electric to share the same passions for content creation, and for me it’s also a current that flows back into my work as a dev.”
According to the Among Us Wiki, Blaustoise also worked as a gaming strategist for Innersloth, the developers of the beloved social deduction game which took the gaming world by storm a couple of years ago.
Explosive growth as a streamer
Blaustoise’s monthly viewership (Image via SullyGnome)
Blaustoise’s growth on Twitch was phenomenal after he quit looking for jobs and started streaming after leaving Riot in 2021. As evidenced by the graph above from Sully Gnome, his average monthly viewership grew exponentially throughout 2021, reaching a peak during early 2022. He currently has 385K followers on Twitch.
Styling himself as a variety streamer, Blustoise’s growth not only comes from his various GTA RP and Valorant gameplays but also because of his massive collaborations with well-established streamers from 100 Thieves and OfflineTV. His recent online beef with Fuslie has caused quite a stir in the streaming community as clips of the streamers trying to make fun of each other’s hairdos went viral last week.
Below is one of the most-watched clips from his channel when he went on a trip with Fuslie and others to Amsterdam TwitchCon, gaining massive views for his IRL streams. He also accompanied Valkyrae and others to Korea last month.
He is also part of the Offline TV and Friends network with extensive collaborations with streamers such as QuarterJade, Sydeon, Pokimane and Starsmitten from the Valorant beta days.
His popularity in gaming circles and impressive resume is a huge boost to his credibility as a video game expert. While that would have attracted viewers initially, his candid personality and fun collaborative content with other streamers has really allowed Blaustoise to gain popularity among the Twitch and YouTube community.