Dr Disrespect: The streamer who is too big to fail

Herschel "Guy" Beahm, also known as Dr Disrespect, began his content creation journey early in 2010, when he posted a gameplay video of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. His early days of content creation got him a gig on Machinima's Youtube channel, where Dr Disrespect was found mostly playing Call of Duty.

However, late in 2011, Guy Beahm went inactive from Youtube, and there was a huge gap of almost five years before a new video was released.

During his break from content creation, Dr Disrespect was appointed as the community manager of Sledgehammer Games - the company responsible for the development of the Call of Duty titles. He stayed with Sledgehammer games from 2011 to 2015 - a period during which he was promoted to a level designer.

Dr Disrespect has since admitted on his stream that many of the multiplayer maps on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare were designed by him.

It was in 2015 that he quit Sledgehammer games to become a full time streamer on Justin.tv, which was later renamed Twitch.

Dr Disrespect and how he got were he is today

During his early days of streaming, he was selected to be a part of the close beta of prominent Battle Royale game H1Z1. Although H1Z1 gave Dr Disrespect a natural environment for his disrespectful in-game persona, it was PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds which made his stream popular within the community.

After the huge success that he received from PUBG, Dr Disrespect transitioned to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 before taking a hiatus for two months in December 2017.

Before going on the break, Dr Disrespect went live on his channel, sans the persona, in his original Guy Beahm personality, and admitted to being guilty of unfaithfulness towards his wife.

After the two month break, Dr Disrespect returned to the platform on 5th February 2018 and it was a record breaking return. Dr Disrespect had a total of 388,000 concurrent viewers on that stream, as the entire community came to welcome him back.

Ever since his breakthrough into the interactive entertainment industry, Dr Disrespect has been a very controversial figure. Starting from racism accusations to the bathroom filming incident at E3, Dr Disrespect has been the center of controversies everywhere.

A similar shock came in the month of June in 2020, when reports started emerging that Dr Disrespect had been banned permanently from Twitch, due to violating their community guidelines or terms of service. The official statement from Twitch read:

"As is our process, we take appropriate action when we have evidence that a streamer has acted in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. These apply to all streamers regardless of status or prominence in the community"

In response to this, Dr Disrespect posted a tweet on 28 June, reading:

Champions Club,Twitch has not notified me on the specific reason behind their decision... Firm handshakes to all for the support during this difficult time.-Dr Disrespect

— #Doctober (@drdisrespect) June 28, 2020

At that point, everything looked grim, as fans were surrounded with uncertainty about Dr Disrespect's future.

That though, was only until Dr. Disrespect dropped two videos on his Youtube channel.

The first one, Alleyways

and the second one, Red Skies.

After another break of two months, Dr Disrespect finally returned to youtube with a 22 minute live session from his own channel, on 8th August 2020, along with a new stream intro.

At the end of the day, Dr Disrespect still remains one of the most controversial personalities in the streaming community, however, he's also a darling to the millions of fans in the Champions' Club.

By the look of things, Dr Disrespect is in the position where people would flock to watch his streams and videos, even if he was to take his talents to a comparatively new platform.