Twitch streamer Asmongold has announced that he is stepping back from his positions at OTK Media and boutique PC builder Starforge Systems so he can focus on becoming "a better version of myself for everyone."
Asmongold, known in the real world as Zack Hoyt, sparked outrage earlier this week with a racist tirade about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military in Gaza, which the UN says has resulted in the deaths of more than 42,000 people so far, most of them women and children. After describing Palestinians as "terrible people" who have a call to genocide "baked into their laws," he said, "They're not the same as us. They come from an inferior culture that is horrible. It kills people for their identity, and it is directly antithetical to everything Western values stand for, and it is an inferior culture in all ways."
The outcry was swift and fierce: His "zackrawrr" account on Twitch was suspended, and a half-hearted "my bad" apology only seemed to make things worse, being widely seen as overly flippant and dismissive. Now he's taking it a step further: In a new video posted to YouTube, Asmongold said he's stepping back from his role at OTK, the company he co-founded in 2020, and its Starforge Systems subsidiary.
"I've slowly been devolving into the most mean-spirited, rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself," Asmongold said near the start of the video.
"The last two years, I think that I haven't really been able to fulfill my responsibilities as a leader in a lot of cases to them, and I think that I've let a lot of people down. One thing this thing has taught me, it's made me realize that I need to get myself in check. I need to get my mind under control. I need to just get my life—I need to fix my fucking life.
"Everything about my life is basically fucked. I'm gonna take a step back from all of that. I'm going to step away from my leadership position at OTK and Starforge and everything. I want to—and they're fine with that, they respect that. I want to do this not only for them but mainly for myself, so I can be a better version of myself for everyone."
While OTK has not publicly commented on Asmongold's situation, Starforge shared a message on X saying they had "mutually agreed to part ways."
Self-improvement is the central theme of Asmongold's video, which begins with what at least has the veneer of actual introspection. He said his comments on Gaza were "a horrible, disgusting, mean-spirited thing to say," and while he remains deeply critical of religious extremism, "it's extremely unfair to categorize everybody in part of that group as religious extremists." The media he's chosen to create and consume have helped shape "certain biases," he continued, "that don't have any sort of relation to what my own real life experience has been."
"Streaming is my entire life. Doing this is my entire existence. And I think that the process of that has been extremely unhealthy for me, and I think what it's done is that it's allowed me to become such a one-dimensional person that I'm not even a person anymore. It's like I'm Dark Souls, I'm going hollow or something."
Look, I take all of this with more than a few grains of salt. I've seen too many come-to-Jesus moments that were quickly forgotten once the public outcry had passed, and Asmongold's reputation does not encourage unrestrained optimism. Subsequent comments the streamer made in the Asmongold subreddit on Wednesday also suggest that the prospect of meaningful change might be a distant hope.
"The vibes and feel of the stream recently has been a lot more tense and a lot of that is my fault," he wrote in an explanation for the apology. "If you think that means my first stream back is going to be playing Dustborn and promoting Sweet Baby, I think you'll be very disappointed. I'm not changing anything other than trying to be more positive and less mean-spirited."
In a reply to one comment, he also reassured followers, "Don't worry, I'll react to a DEI=DIE gaming video first day back to stream," and in another he asserted that "a lot of the laws over there are insane and I completely disagree with them and I think they're disgusting," a not-especially-meaningful shift in verbiage from "culture" to "law."
Despite obvious apprehensions, Asmongold said he'd like to visit countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Dubai to see what they're like for himself, which is maybe a bit aspirational at this point. In the short term, he has more practical, life-oriented goals: Regular bedtimes, cleaning up his house, and presumably once his Twitch suspension is lifted, a more consistent streaming schedule.
"I want to live a normal life," he said. "I want to spend maybe a little bit less time streaming and I want to spend more time creating my own videos and doing my own things and spending time on things that I really enjoy and basically just expanding my existence as a person."
