4Chan, popular among conspiracy theorists and gamers, claim to include the entirety of the platform’s Twitch.tv streaming history and an Amazon Game Studios product, still under development, designed to challenge Valve’s dominant Steam storefront. Bloomberg has reported previously on Amazon’s plans for a digital game store.

The leak also offers a glimpse into the wealth generated in the gaming sub-industry. A document listing Twitch’s top earners shows gross earnings since 2019 reached $9.6 million for the platform’s top account, “CriticalRole.” The account, a set of voice actors, according to their Twitch page, generated an average of $370,000 a year, according to the document. The list points to 13 accounts that have made more than $108,000 a year and at least 80 who’ve collected more than $1 million since 2019.

“I really hope that no major personal info (Full names, emails, address, phone number, banking info) gets out in the rumored next part of the leak,” said Mr. Hellyer, who has about 72,000 followers on his channel, “tehMorag.” “I’ll take the heat if people are surprised about how much I make in the coming days, and try to have an open dialog about it.”

Hackers for years have targeted gamers to cheat and take over accounts, increasingly training their sights on developers to steal potentially valuable information about forthcoming releases. Earlier this year, Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts Inc. and Polish game developer CD Projekt SA each reported hacks. Rather than holding hostage CD Projekt’s data for ransom, hackers said at the time that they would auction source code for games on the dark web.

Cyberattacks on organizations world-wide are up 40% this year compared with the first 10 months of 2020, according to security firm Check Point Software Technologies Inc.

Mark Ostrowski, director of engineering for Check Point in the eastern U.S., said the potential breach of Twitch’s source code could open the door for future incidents.

“Silently you have hackers, competitors and users scouring the code to find flaws to exploit or gain a competitive advantage in their own development,” he said.

It is unclear whether the breach included additional personal data about Twitch users. People who use the platform should change their passwords and enable multifactor authentication on their accounts as a precaution, said Jarno Niemelä, principal researcher at Finnish cybersecurity firm F-Secure.

The incident comes after Twitch recently grappled with harassment on its platform. Last month the company sued two users in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for allegedly sending racist, antigay, sexist and violent messages and content to others. The company said these so-called hate raids violated its terms of service, traumatized some users and forced some off the platform, according to the complaint.

The hack wasn’t a first for Twitch. In 2015 the company said some users’ information might have been accessed without authorization, including passwords, email addresses , user names, home addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. Twitch canceled the password of those who received the email, saying the passwords are encrypted but still could have been accessed.

Streamers on Twitch typically generate revenue through advertising, sponsorships and tips from viewers upon achieving certain viewership metrics. Twitch cuts special deals with its most popular streamers for additional income. Videogame publishers, including Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard Inc. , have paid these big names tens of thousands of dollars apiece to play their latest releases for a few hours on Twitch as a way to boost sales.

Twitch mainly competes with Facebook Inc. , Alphabet Inc. ’s YouTube and, until last year, Microsoft Corp. ’s Mixer. Microsoft closed Mixer after a little more than three years for failing to keep pace with rivals, even though it poached top streamers from Twitch such as Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, known for playing “Fortnite.”

For the past several years Amazon has been working to develop its own videogames and integrate them into Twitch. The company has struggled to put out a hit, though recently it released a computer game that had a successful launch.

“New World” was among the most-played games on the Steam service when it was released on Sept. 28, attracting a peak of about 700,000 players. On Twitch, high-profile broadcasters such as Shroud played the multiplayer role-playing game, which retails for $49.99.

On Oct. 1, Mr. Bezos expressed his satisfaction with “New World” on Twitter. “After many failures and setbacks in gaming we have a success,” he wrote on the messaging service. “So proud of the team for the persistence.”

You May Also Like:

• Kylie Jenner Strips Down & Gets Covered in Blood for ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ Collab
• Who Is Cynthia Denicolo? Age and Wikipedia – Eric Ferguson Sexual Allegations