March 8 marks International Women’s Day, and to commemorate the occasion, Twitch has teamed up with its own Women’s Guild and automobile manufacturer Honda to hold a competitive Overcooked 2 tournament. Users on X have immediately begun dogpiling on Twitch following the announcement, due to what some see as the poor optics in choosing a cooking video game to celebrate a day focused on women’s rights and gender equality.
The event was announced on March 2 by the official Twitch Rivals X account, alongside a trailer featuring Overcooked 2 gameplay and the text, “Let’s celebrate International Women’s Day together.” It did not take long for users to criticise the live-streaming platform for its choice of game, with the most popular quote tweet simply stating “Y’all picked a cooking game?”
While several users on X took the opportunity to tweet overtly sexist jokes, others genuinely took umbrage with Twitch’s choice of game, such as Esports Hall of Fame inductee and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive World Champion Heather “sapphiRe” Garozzo. “Women also play popular competitive games! @RaidiantGG operates women’s esports events for Fortnite, Rocket League, VALORANT, Rainbow Six Siege and Overwatch,” Garozzo wrote. “Let us know if you’d like collab on other titles that maybe better represent women’s empowerment.”
However, as confirmed by Twitch streamer LucyPancakes, Overcooked 2 was chosen by the Women’s Guild, a group of women streamers which is part of the Twitch Unity Guilds Program. “I’m part of the Women’s Guild, btw. They know how this looks and chose to move forward with it anyways because…our entire community…overwhelmingly voted for it…I don’t think the higher ups realized it was going to look *this* bad.”
LucyPancakes expanded on her disdain for the choice of game in a separate post. “We could have really done something epic. Dominated a male-occupying game. All female Marvel Rivals teams, or BF6, Warzone. Proved that we are more than just casual gamers.” As of writing, Twitch has yet to make an official comment.