The Rust Kick Off 2025 brought hundreds of Kick streamers together to enjoy a long weekend of collecting resources, fragging, and giving their viewers opportunities to collect viewer rewards for the first time on Kick. The event was a huge success, generating millions of hours of watch time and highlighting Kick’s passionate community, especially in the Americas.
Kick partnered with Facepunch Studios, the developers of Rust, for their first-ever Drops-enabled event. Their Rust Kick Off 2025 event coincided with a wider Drops campaign on the platform, which continues through until November 23; over 150 streamers were invited to participate in the event, ensuring a wide spread of coverage across various fan bases and audiences.
In total, the inaugural Drops-enabled Kick event received 13.85M Hours Watched, for just shy of 80 hours of broadcasting time. Viewers for the Rust Kick Off 2025 were largely either English or Spanish-speaking, representing two of the platform’s largest groups. Argentinian creator Ivan Raúl “ElSpreen” Buhajeruk Fernández was the most popular singular creator for the event, having recorded over 35,100 Peak Viewers on the final day.
The Drops campaign during the Rust Kick Off 2025 included a unique activation method, whereby viewers could receive specific items by watching specific channels. This would quickly funnel viewers into specific channels, giving them wild boosts in viewership — this was indeed the case for ElSpreen, the event’s most popular streamer, whose viewership spiked by thousands and thousands.
Other top creators for the Rust Kick Off 2025 also managed above 30,000 peak concurrent viewers, including Spain’s Ricoy and Tyler Faraz “trainwreckstv” Niknam. While the top creators enjoyed significant spikes in viewers, other, smaller streamers also benefitted: across all 159 broadcast channels. For the Rust category on Kick, over 1,000 Viewers per Channel were recorded during the Rust Kick Off 2025 — an increase of over 260% compared to the days leading up to the tournament.
Turning towards the top-placing participants of the Rust Kick Off 2025, we can analyze the sentiment of chat for specific players. Chase TB, the self-described “#1 rust player”, finished the event with the most kills out of all participants: 451. His performance at the event was received largely positively, but also polarized some viewers; Chase recorded the highest negative sentiment proportion of all top three placements, with 12% negative mentions.
Within these negative mentions, roughly 7% of the total messages were cheating accusations, or chatters otherwise throwing suspicion at Chase — “chase is kinda sus”. However, most of the mentions for Chase were highly positive, praising his skill, consistency, and calling him the greatest. Even under the neutral category of mentions, fans were asking questions like “who is Chase?” and “Is Chase streaming?”, searching for information on this star player.
The two Spanish cG streamers enjoyed strong support from Spanish-speaking audiences, and the minor amount of negative comments can be partly attributed to sarcasm, minor critiques, or crude jokes. While Lukasito largely avoided too many accusations, M2 received a share of cheating and scripting accusations from the chats. While their mentions across chats were largely Spanish, there was some English and even the odd Portuguese-language mention of the two.
Generally, chat mentions for the top-ranking players of the Rust Kick Off 2025 were positive. Most chatters praised their obvious skills, gave their compliments to the players, and cheered them on from the sidelines. While the players themselves received mostly positive praise, the new Drops function saw a more neutral welcome to Kick.
For the inaugural Drops-enabled event on Kick, the Rust Kick Off 2025 saw 33.2K total messages mentioning the platform’s new product — and another 21.8K attempts at a "!drop" command. Largely, discussions about the product were neutral in tone, consisting of questions, instructions, and information. As one would expect, there was a significant portion of single-word “drop” messages throughout the event, but even with these excluded, a neutral tone reigned supreme over Drop’s first weekend.
While most chatters were sharing information and learning about the Drops system, the majority of other messages were positive rather than negative. A solid proportion of messages expressed excitement that Drops had arrived on Kick and praised the development. A smaller proportion of viewers (~0.5%) expressed very positive messages, showing extreme enthusiasm or joy: e.g., “GOT THE DROP !!!! LOVE YOU COCO !!!!!!”.
Negative sentiment mentions of the new function were rare, but still popped up. Most viewers expressed mild complaints about not receiving a specific item or about how long they had to wait for the item. Only a minuscule section of the total messages was considered very negative, meaning openly hostile or aggressive.
Kick’s inaugural Drops campaign helped lift the success of their collaborative event with Facepunch Studios. The Rust Kick Off 2025 was followed by hundreds of thousands of viewers from across the world, spanning the Americas and Europe. Following Drops campaigns on the platforms are likely to receive only more attention — and hopefully more positive chat sentiment — as users come to grips with the new addition to the platform.
