ZEvent 2022: dates, program, participants... We summarize everything for you

After a 2021 edition of unparalleled success, the ZEvent returns next week to set the stage again. On the menu, 50 hours of live streaming, streaming stars, and lots of generosity.

[Updated on August 30, 2022 at 2:18 p.m.] With its ten million euros raised in 2021, the ZEvent has become by far the biggest event in French streaming. Adrien "ZeratoR" Nougaret's charity weekend is a date not to be missed this year, once again offering us the opportunity to enjoy more than fifty hours of live entertainment content broadcast, in the company of around fifty biggest French-speaking streamers of the moment. But that's not all, the ZEvent us once again an opening concert, where we can find Soprano, Bigflo

Adrien Nougaret and his teams presented the 2022 edition of ZEvent at the beginning of July. The weekend will take place from September 9 to 11, and will bring together more than 50 streamers for more than 50 hours of streaming devoted to 5 associations yet to be determined. As usual, the ZEvent aims to associate the communities of several fun content broadcasters on the Twitch streaming platform, in order to accumulate donations for the benefit of a charity association. Last year, the event succeeded in freeing up more than 10 million euros for Action contre la Faim.

The ZeratoR event once again plans to welcome more than fifty French-speaking streamers. There are essential stars of streaming on Twitch like Mister MV, Skyyart, Skyrroz and Chow1, but also regulars of the event like LittleBigWhale, Domingo, Solary or Xari. You can view the full guest list for the event below. Also note that various artists will participate in the charity concert on the sidelines of the event, including BigFlo and Oli, PV Nova, French Fuse and Berywam. We explain everything about the concert a little further down in this article.

Regarding the debates generated by the announcement of this list of participants, they were limited to the indignation of a certain part of the communities of certain absent streamers (Michou, Inoxtag, Amine, Squeezie or others) on the networks social. Some malicious and dishonest posts forced the main interested parties to react and calm the crowds in front of the cries of racism and discrimination. As a reminder, the 2021 event had been tainted by acts of cyberbullying and inappropriate behavior during the broadcast. The young Inoxtag streamer, 19 years old in 2021, had invited a South American actress during his live broadcast before indulging in a humorous tone of sexist remarks in front of a hilarious chat. These actions were then openly criticized by Ultia, a streamer also present during the ZEvent. Only the criticism did not seem acceptable to part of the young man's community, which subsequently covered the different profiles of the young woman with insults and threats of all kinds. Behaviors belatedly condemned by ZeratoR. Note that Ultia is back for this 2022 edition while Inoxtag will be absent. You can learn more about the 2021 edition a little further down in this article.

Faced with the wave of aggressive tweets from some fans disappointed not to see their favorite streamer at the event, ZeratoR split a series of tweets explaining his point of view on the situation. These tweets explain:

"For streamers who can't make it to ZEVENT, don't bump into them, we sent out most invites on May 4th to be exact. When it's a scheduling issue it's bad luck but we can't stagger everything and we thought giving 5 months notice would be enough.

I am obviously disappointed not to see some very important streamers from the platform, know that they have all been invited but no one is obliged to come. Everyone does as they can/wants but I'm the first saddened, ZEVENT is for me a way to bring together a large part of our community once a year for 3 days to try to come together for something bigger than us, which is beyond us.

We try to do our best to make everyone as good as possible and we will always continue to do that for all the events we organize. Regarding the disappointed now, I understand your frustration and that you may be annoyed. But always coming back to this race for figures is for me a very harmful element. ZEVENT has NEVER been a race for the pot. YES it's good to break the record every year, YES it makes us very proud to see that more and more people trust us, but in reality, beyond 1€ it's already a successful event for us.

If the atmosphere on site does not correspond to what you expect from a ZEVENT, I invite you to make a donation for the association of your choice during this same period and to defend the associative cause for which you want to fight. Everyone can take action! [...]

This is the end of this thread. I hesitated a lot to speak but I saw a lot of reactions which I think legitimized some details and I thank you for the confidence you bring to the event. Thank you all"

If the 2021 edition had been dedicated to Action contre la Faim, the ZEvent 2022 changed slightly by partnering with GoodPlanet. Founded in 2005 by photographer and director Yann Arthus-Bertrand, this French foundation recognized as being of public utility aims to "place ecology and humanism at the heart of consciences and to arouse the desire to act concretely for the Earth and its inhabitants. It offers access to green energy to the most disadvantaged populations and joins forces with various companies to ask them to commit to reducing their carbon emissions. She was notably behind the film project Human by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, released in 2015.

The choice of this association was debated for a few days on Twitter, with many Internet users criticizing its proximity to Total and the support of Yann Arthus-Bertrand at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Even if the latter has since claimed to have made a mistake in this association, the links between GoodPlanet and certain energy circles are disturbing. It is moreover the choice of this association which had pushed certain streamers to refuse the invitation of ZeratoR to the ZEvent, like Maghla or Arkunir. In addition, Goodplanet has long been associated with "Greenwashing", considered too wait-and-see by some, but also with biodynamics, an obscure current of agriculture pointed out for its sectarianization by the Miviludes. Critics of the choice of this foundation as the beneficiary of ZEvent 2022 have been very numerous. So many that the organization of the streaming weekend decided to exclude it from the event. A decision taken this weekend by ZeratoR and his teams, and explained in a post on social networks:

The rupture of the partnership between Goodplanet and ZEvent has since been confirmed by Albane Godard, general manager of the foundation. She deplores the many "unfounded" criticisms made by Internet users on social networks, while affirming that the environmental cause should be supported without fail in the current times. On the side of the ZEvent staff, this unprecedented withdrawal is justified in an open letter to the spectators: "It is clear that the choice of this year's association did not convince you" "The truth is that the perfect association does not exist, some carry out illegal actions, others are too small to accommodate such an amount of money and others are financed by actors whose activities destroy our planet on a daily basis. can we read in the explanation of ZeratoR.

The sidelining of Goodplanet therefore leaves space for other associations for the ZEvent 2022, and the decision was made to select five associations which will share the donations of the event equally. These are the Internet users were called to vote to make this choice from a long list of candidates. It included: La fresco du climat, 350.org, France Nature Environnement (FNE), League for the Protection of Birds (LPO), The SeaCleaners, Zero Waste France, Friends of the Earth, WWF France, Greenpeace France, Bloom , Act for the environment, ASPAS, Surfrider, Sea Sheperd France, Time for the planet, The Shift Project, Wings of the Ocean, Noé, 1% for the planet, WeForest, Foundation for Nature and Man and finally TERAGIR . Internet users spoke and the five associations chosen were:

As in 2021, the ZEvent will be preceded by a 3-hour concert where several French music artists will meet. This concert will take place at the Zenith in Montpellier and will be broadcast live on Twitch. We will notably find the rapper duo Bigflo and Oli, the streamer LittleBigWhale who will perform once again on stage with PV Nova, the electro duo French Fuse and the rapper Soprano. The ticket office for the event is already open and confirms that the event will take place on Thursday September 08, 2022 at 7:30 p.m., 24 hours before the start of the ZEvent. The profits from the concert will be used to finance the ZEvent and will be donated to the Goodplanet association.

The ZEvent is an event organized by Adrien "ZeratoR" Nougaret and Alexandre "Dach" Dachary since 2016. Each year, these two big names in the French streaming scene bring together a whole panel of streamers for a weekend. More than 50 hours of continuous streaming on Twitch, Amazon's essential live streaming platform. Concretely, the guests gather during a gigantic LAN where everyone broadcasts their stream and participates in common activities. The amount of donations offered by all the spectators, or viewers, is accumulated in a kitty donated at the end of the weekend to a charity association. Each streamer encourages their viewers by setting themselves "donation goals", challenges to be completed if their viewers' donations reach certain amounts. It is also necessary to add to this amount all the sales of derivative products (mainly t-shirts) which represents a non-negligible amount each year. In 2021, ZEvent partnered with Action contre la Faim, the French NGO that fights against malnutrition in the world.

If we could have believed that the 2020 edition had been the peak of the ZEvent, in terms of donations or audience, nothing is less true today. The French streaming charity event ended with a monstrous prize pool of 10,064,480 euros. A sum that smashes the record for the year 2020 which was 5.7 million euros, and proves once again that streaming is an essential element of French culture. More than a million spectators watched the closing ceremony of this crazy weekend, making ZEvent a kind of new generation Telethon that is now impossible to ignore.

If nothing can tarnish the success of an event that has raised more than 10 million euros for a good cause, the ZEvent 2021 was still polluted by a small controversy. Indeed, at the height of the show, the young streamer Inoxtag gave us a relatively uncomfortable sequence by making openly sexist remarks in front of his guest, a non-French-speaking Mexican actress Andrea Pedrero, and in front of more than 400,000 viewers. hilarious. A situation that seems to have escaped the organization of the event but not Ultia, one of the few streamers present at ZEvent. The young woman openly criticized the inappropriate behavior of the young man and the general complacency in front of this disturbing sequence, before suffering waves of harassment on social networks herself. Besides the violence of the interactions on Twitch, Twitter or Instagram, this sequence also showed the limits of the young medium that is Twitch. It was known that the majority of users of the platform are young men between 15 and 25 years old, and that Twitch has often been singled out for its lack of moderation of chats and spectators, too often leaving the field open to misogyny latent encouraged by the anonymity of users. It also somewhat demonstrated the dangers of the show for the show, and the need for the organizational body of the ZEvent to be more attentive to the content it broadcasts.