XCOM 2

We picked up XCOM 2 at launch in February 2016, and Firaxis handed us a game that reviewers loved—near-universal acclaim, they said. But there was a catch: near-universal caveats about performance. We suffered through 20fps turns, AI processing delays that seemed to calculate your doom in real-time, hitching camera movement even on top-tier hardware. Two years of coverage from 2016 through 2017 documented the launch disaster and the slow patches that barely touched the underlying performance problems. The timed missions kept us coming back despite the stutter, and the mod support became a lifeline for viewers who wanted to customize the experience. We proved that you could make an insanely fun tactics game while simultaneously delivering one of 2016's worst PC ports. The 95% shots that missed? Those rage moments are what people remember about our streams.

We streamed 80.3 hours of XCOM 2, and the community responded—21,740 hours watched. That's 766 average viewers and a peak of 1,425 during the chaos. We gained 279 followers on the strength of watching tactics gameplay with real stakes. Those numbers tell the story: XCOM 2 had soul even when it was technically broken, and viewers understood the appeal of brutal turn-based combat where one bad roll ended a run.