Pokimane Turned Down Twitch's Best Offer to Sell Cookies and Sign Other Streamers

On January 30, 2024, Imane “Pokimane” Anys — one of the most-followed women on Twitch, with nearly a decade of streaming behind her — let her exclusive platform contract lapse without signing a new one. She didn’t quit streaming. She kept her channel, kept her audience, and walked away from the one thing almost every top streamer chases: an exclusivity check. What she chose instead was a cookie company and a stake in a talent agency. That trade — platform money for ownership — is the actual story, not a retirement that never happened.

The come-up

Anys created her Twitch account in June 2013 and started streaming League of Legends after reaching Platinum rank, according to a profile referenced by Wikipedia’s entry on her career. By 2017 she had 450,000 Twitch followers and won the Shorty Awards’ Best Twitch Streamer award. A 2018 sponsorship put her inside Fortnite’s breakout moment, including an appearance at Epic’s E3 pro-am, the same wave of attention that built several of the era’s biggest streaming careers. In March 2020, she signed a multi-year deal to stream exclusively on Twitch — the kind of lock-in contract platforms use to keep their biggest names from jumping to YouTube Gaming or a rival — and in February 2022 she re-signed another exclusive Twitch deal, this time reportedly for less money than competing offers, citing her community as the reason she stayed, per PC Gamer’s report on the renewal.

The business built alongside the stream

Anys didn’t wait for her streaming career to plateau before building outside it. In 2020 she joined the clothing brand Cloak as a partner and creative director, per Tubefilter. She co-founded the content house OfflineTV, stepping back from day-to-day involvement with a “graduation” video posted to the group’s channel in May 2023 while remaining affiliated. In October 2021, she co-founded the talent management and brand-consulting firm RTS as its chief creative officer — a company that, through a partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment, took a co-ownership stake in the Evolution Championship Series (Evo), one of fighting games’ largest tournaments, as reported at the time by Esports.gg, PC Gamer, and NME.

The cookie controversy

On November 13, 2023, Anys launched Myna Snacks, a better-for-you snack brand, with its first product, Midnight Mini Cookies, priced at $28 for a four-pack. When viewers pushed back on the price during a livestream, she responded, “I know math is hard when you’re an idiot. But, if you’re a broke boy, just say so” — a line win.gg reported drew a backlash large enough that the clip reportedly pulled in close to 20 million views in a day. She later apologized, saying the comment was aimed at one specific chatter rather than her audience generally, and said on a podcast appearance that the backlash “hurt” — coverage corroborated across win.gg, ComicBook.com, and EssentiallySports. It’s a smaller, pettier controversy than the platform departures and business deals around it, but it’s real, it’s hers, and it’s part of the same story: she was already running a company, with a company’s pricing problems, well before she stopped renewing Twitch deals.

Walking away from Twitch’s best offer

When her exclusivity contract came up again in January 2024, Anys didn’t renew it. She posted on X that it was the “end of an era,” thanking Twitch for “a decade” of “memories,” and the next day explained her reasoning on her own stream, in comments reported by win.gg: “If you see Twitch and streaming nowadays, it’s really almost nothing like how it was back then,” she said, adding, “I feel like it has regressed a lot” and that this was “the biggest reason why I have a hard time wanting to devote all of my time” to the platform. Her stated plan going forward was to stream across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram instead of locking into one platform: “I just want to be able to partake in different platforms and things either as I see fit,” she said. “Now I’m just going to have fun.” She has continued to stream on Twitch since, just without an exclusivity contract compelling her to.

As of June 2026, Wikipedia’s entry on Anys — citing Teen Vogue and Social Blade — put her Twitch following at roughly 9.46 million, still the most-followed female streamer on the platform; independent tracker Streamscharts put the same figure at roughly 9.45 million around the same period. Her YouTube channel carried roughly 6.6 million subscribers as of a April 2026 platform-profile count cited by Wikipedia, a figure corroborated independently by the trackers CreatorDB (dated May 28, 2026) and Yespress.

What our checker would add — and why we didn’t run it

Anys streams on both Twitch and YouTube, the two platforms — alongside each other — that our free authenticity checker can score with live data. We didn’t run that check for this piece, and nothing here states or implies a numeric score for her account. Nothing about a multi-million follower count run through our methodology would be surprising on its own; the point of a live check is what it says about engagement and growth today, not the top-line number anyone can already see. You’re welcome to run it yourself at /check/twitch/pokimane for a live read.

The bottom line

Pokimane’s story isn’t a decline story or a scandal story — it’s a streamer who spent her platform-exclusivity years also building things she could own outright: a clothing-brand role, a content house, a talent agency with a stake in a major esports tournament, and eventually a snack company with its own very public growing pains. When the next exclusivity offer came, she had enough built elsewhere that she didn’t need it, and said so, on stream, in her own words.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Pokimane” (accessed October 2026), citing Teen Vogue and Social Blade for follower counts; Tubefilter, on Pokimane joining Cloak as partner and creative director (June 2020); PC Gamer, on Pokimane’s February 2022 Twitch re-signing; Esports.gg, on Pokimane co-founding RTS and its Evo stake (2021); NME, on Pokimane’s Evo co-ownership; win.gg, on Pokimane’s “broke boy” comment and the Myna backlash; win.gg, “I’m done with Twitch’s messy behavior”: Pokimane talks future streaming plans (January 2024); Streamscharts, Pokimane channel follower tracking.