Recently there have been countless claims of the once beloved Fortnite streamer Richard Tyler Blevin (Ninja) having fallen off in relevance. Nowadays he's reaching a mere fraction of the number he reached in his glory days; this raised questions of what exactly caused his fall from grace. So, we decided to do our homework and answer this very question for you all; because obviously, who else would?

We witnessed the start of Ninja through what many fans of his consider the  “Brown Hair era” of Ninja. At this point in his life was only playing Halo 3 (a video game initially released in 2007) professionally, using the alias “NinjasHyper”. He, like many gamers at the time,  joined a plethora of teams including Luminosity Gaming, Cloud9, and Team Liquid. When not traveling to gaming tournaments Ninja streamed on Twitch including games such as h1z1 and Pubg, with many rage clips of him–often attracting millions of likes and views, these clips surfacing provided an outlet for the public to witness a star on the rise–or maybe just a flicker of a light since it was still fairly early in his career.  Ninja was a streamer who had great potential with a dynamic personality and cool branding. During this era, Ninja would pull in 3,000 or fewer viewers

Ninja saw his peak during his blue hair era, he had begun playing a new up-and-coming game called Fortnite and eventually became known as one of the founding fathers of the popularity of the game. During its early stages, Ninja was one of the few decent players and made a name for himself by constantly dropping high-kill games. The success and hype he saw during this era were also created by collaborations with side streamers (smaller content creators) including Dr.Lupo, TimTheTatMan, SypherPK, and CourageJD, allowing them to create more content together and grow simultaneously. However, we left out one squad member none other than Champagnepapi, During the collaboration, Ninja’s stream hit an all-time Twitch (a live streaming platform) record of 446,623 concurrent viewers. The popularity of this stream caught the eye of Redbull Esports which prompted them to sponsor Ninja this would be made extremely obvious when a mini fridge filled with Red Bull energy drinks started appearing in every stream and alongside the Red Bull logo on his headband. This sponsorship would go on to pay Ninja a whopping 350,000 dollars for being a part of them. Ninja raked in over $5,000,000 in one month from his creator code alone. Fortnite recognized Ninja’s success and made him one of the first content creators to receive an Icon Skin adding his character to the game and solidifying his role in Fortnite. 

Ninja’s pink hair era –though short-lived– saw many changes to his formula of streaming.  The most notable of these changes was making the switch from his longtime partner TwitchTV, to Mixer for a small fee of thirty million dollars. This change caused a mixer (pun most definitely intended) of emotions as Ninja's view count plummeted down to his peak brown hair era, we could say Ninja’s downfall was exactly like a king being dethroned. Ninja fell completely off because the platform itself wasn't popular and was completely abandoned by the creator Microsoft. So without a good platform, what could Ninja really do? Part of his demise was due to the decline of Fortnite’s popularity amongst gamers alike as the game lost its simple charm and became too competitive with many claiming “tryhards” were starting to ruin the game. 

During this era, Ninja’s popularity was fading just like his hair. We don’t know if he did this on purpose or not but nonetheless, he was down on views. Now free from the contract with Mixer, Ninja was finally able to regain that grasp on his own streaming rights. This resulted in him seeking refuge back with TwitchTV, but similar to Mixer, his viewer count was not where it once was compared to his glory days. Ninja was no longer the face of the Fortnite scene, which was already struggling to keep relevancy. This has pushed Ninja off that cliff, clinging on to dear life for anything that involves him and could potentially boost his relevancy.

A prime example of this was at the beginning of 2024 when a freestyle that went a little like, “Imagine if Ninja got a low taper fade”, became a popular meme. Ninja hearing this gave him a glimmer of hope and Ninja latched onto the idea of being relevant once more. To this day Ninja still mentions the low taper fade meme and how “...for the memes of 2024 the low taper fade is 100% going to be the meme of January…”. It was funny at the time but two months later, who’s laughing anymore?  Still, there are countless other instances of Ninja doing this; honestly, it comes off as forced and desperate.  

Despite the decline in popularity and the desperate attempts at a career revival, we hope Ninja could pull a Jesus Christ one day and come back to the top as he was in our childhood. We can't let this man’s talent go to waste. Ninja is an excellent entertainer and we hope he can find success if not on Fortnite rather than on another game. But at the end of the day this comeback is on Ninja and we'll be waiting for his second coming.