Mark Zuckerberg is doing the most to rebrand himself as a cool guy. After being memed on for most of his professional life, he’s spent the last year growing out his once-objectively-terrible haircut, getting a little more sporty, and is willing to poke fun at himself: he recently called back to his tragic 2020 sunscreen face candid with a July 4 video of himself surfing pretty effortlessly while wearing a suit, drinking a beer, and holding up an American flag.
The latest step in his chillification? Saying he might boot up a Twitch channel and start streaming Civilization.
He took a minute during Meta‘s latest Connect event (where it announced, among other things, that it’s still trying to make wearables happen) to tell Gen Z-aimed outlet Pubity that he started thinking about getting on Twitch after his wife Priscilla Chan pointed out that he has over 1,000 hours of playtime on the strategy game’s latest iteration, Civilization VI.
In Civ, players pick a world leader, and build a society from the ground up, with the ultimate goal of building a long-lasting empire that can withstand aggression from other players’ (or NPCs’) civilizations.
“I think at some point, I should do, like, a Twitch stream of me playing with someone, because I’m pretty convinced that I’m close to grandmaster status,” he said. “I’d be surprised if anyone in the world could beat me at that.”
Those are fighting words, considering how dedicated Civ players can be. The game doesn’t have too big of an audience on Twitch; according to Twitch Tracker, it averages around 1,400 concurrent viewers at any given moment. Other turn-based strategy games like TeamFight Tactics average around 10,000 viewers. Despite that relatively lower viewership, though, Civ has been around since 1995 and has a dedicated fanbase, including expert-level players who’ve set Guinness World Records within the game. Civilization VI, which came out in 2016, sold a whopping 11 million copies.
Zuckerberg himself has a long history with Civ. As Dexerto points out, he’s previously spoken about how he was playing it when he received his now-famous acceptance email from Harvard.
“How many of you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you got that email telling you you got into Harvard? I was playing the video game Civilization,” he said.
Civ doesn’t have a structured, professional competitive league with official player levels like Apex Legends or Overwatch, so Zuck saying he’s a “grandmaster” is applying chess terminology to the game–which tracks, considering how strategy-driven it is. There are lots of community events, though, and we’re pretty sure if Zuckerberg were to challenge those events’ top winners, he’d find quite a few people willing to play him live on stream.
And probably more than a few people willing to watch. Zuckerberg is far from the first public figure to use gaming on Twitch as a way to reach new (and younger) audiences, but most of those public figures aren’t necessarily gamers themselves, just guest-starring a gamer’s channel and playing a few casual rounds. Zuck wants people to know he is a capital-G Gamer, and is clearly competitive about it. With that in mind, people may actually tune in to see his skills…and see if he can be charismatic enough to hold an audience amidst all the noise on Twitch.
