Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitch stripped Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek of his verified partner badge and hid his channel on the site’s search after the popular streamer and former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pro announced yesterday that he was leaving the platform for Mixer.
In a vacuum, those two things wouldn’t necessarily mean much because a dormant channel doesn’t need to be promoted in search. Applied to a prominent streamer who left the platform the day before, however, it becomes a sign of how Twitch thinks about its biggest personalities. Leaving, to Twitch, seems to mean something like a betrayal. Twitch’s partner badge is one of the harder verifications to get online, and it denotes a level of status on the site. Grzesiek’s announcement was instantly…