TimtheTatman, Fall Guys, & Dude Bro Streamers: Unpacking Hegemonic Masculinity on Twitch

This paper examines how TimtheTatman (Timothy Betar), a prominent Twitch streamer, leveraged a "Dude Bro Streamer" persona during the August 2020 Fall Guys promotional episode, when Fall Guys' official account publicly taunted him over his inability to win a game. The author argues that this persona draws on hegemonic, white, cisgender masculinity and gaming expertise as cultural capital, allowing Betar to convert on-platform rage and harassment-adjacent banter into commercial success. The thesis is that Twitch's creator economy rewards streamers who align with androcentric norms, while streamers from marginalized racial, gender, and sexual backgrounds face harassment and far greater obstacles to professionalization.

The study's central empirical moment is the viral spike in attention: roughly 1.3 million viewers tuned into Betar's stream, with an average of about 182,000 concurrent viewers, following the taunts. Fall Guys subsequently surpassed seven million Steam sales by late August 2020. The paper also cites Twitch's claim that roughly seven million people stream monthly, contrasted with an estimated 51,000 streamers admitted to its Partner Program, a disparity the author uses to frame unequal access to monetization.

The analysis is a case study based on an inductive thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke's approach, of tweets and news coverage from August 11 to 20, 2020, drawn from Betar, Twitch, Fall Guys, advertisers, and other influential streamers. Coding was conducted in Dedoose using word clouds and code co-occurrence features. The author frames the work as preliminary, and its scope is limited to a single episode and a small corpus of social media posts, so its findings are interpretive rather than generalizable across the Twitch population.