FaZe Banks Says CORE's Growth Plateaued. They Gained 129,000 Twitch Followers in a Single Day This Summer.

Sep 4, 2026 · ShinyPull Data Team

FaZe Banks and StableRonaldo got into it on X on September 3. It started over money. Ronaldo said the CORE YouTube channel covers the group's bills on its own. Banks, the former FaZe Clan CEO who fronted the money for CORE's launch, wasn't having it.

"Since you guys have left, Ron you might be up because of Streamer University," Banks wrote. "It's plateaued, you guys have hit some level of a ceiling. I think you guys were at your peak during the Subathons."

CORE is the six-person collective Marlon, StableRonaldo, JasonTheWeen, Lacy, Adapt, and Silky formed after leaving FaZe Clan, running out of a Los Angeles content house Banks helped bankroll. Banks' framing was specific: whatever growth they had, it already happened, and it happened during a subathon-style push. We track StableRonaldo's follower and subscriber counts daily on both platforms he streams and posts to, so instead of arguing about it, we pulled the numbers.

Why this fight is even happening

CORE didn't quietly split off from FaZe Clan. The group's formation was revealed on a livestream Banks himself hosted on April 30, framed around FaZe Clan's collapse as a company. The six of them then moved into a $20 million Los Angeles content house, funded in part by Banks. He isn't a neutral outsider comparing two companies when he calls CORE's growth "plateaued." He financed the launch and has a direct stake in whether it looks like a good bet or a bad one a few months later.

What actually happened in July

Ronaldo's Twitch account grew at a steady pace through the first half of July, roughly 2,800 new followers a day. Then, on July 16, it jumped by 129,302 followers in a single day. The next day added another 63,050. That two-day stretch lines up exactly with CORE's widely covered Twitch debut as a group, which Streams Charts logged at over 13 million hours watched despite the drama swirling around the launch.

Marlon's account did the same thing on the same two days, up 76,113 followers on July 17 alone. Whatever caused the spike hit the whole group at once, not just Ronaldo.

The comedown, measured properly

Here's where "plateaued" stops matching the data. Across the 30 days after the debut spike (July 4 to August 4), Ronaldo's Twitch account added 427,819 followers, a number so large it can only be explained by that one viral week. Across the next 30 days, August 4 to September 4, it added 91,715. That's a sharp drop from the debut month, but it's close to the account's pre-debut pace of roughly 2,800 a day. In plain terms: the growth didn't hit a wall. It went back to being normal once the one-time event stopped being new.

The most recent few days do look slower than August's average, closer to 1,700 a day rather than 3,000. That's a short enough window that it's worth watching rather than concluding anything from yet, the kind of dip that shows up regularly in creator growth data without meaning much on its own.

YouTube tells a gentler version of the same story

The YouTube channel Ronaldo pointed to directly, the one Banks says pays their bills, shows the same shape without the spike. It grew from 1,190,000 to 1,290,000 subscribers in July, then from 1,290,000 to 1,370,000 in August, a 100,000-subscriber month followed by an 80,000-subscriber month. That's a 20 percent slowdown, not a ceiling, and it's the kind of gradual deceleration that happens to almost any channel a few months past a launch spike.

So was Banks right

Half right. CORE's Twitch growth absolutely did peak during a specific, identifiable event, and Banks named the right window for it. But "plateaued" and "hit a ceiling" describe something that stopped growing. Ronaldo's accounts haven't stopped. Twitch is adding close to 90,000 followers a month and YouTube is adding 80,000 subscribers a month, several weeks after the moment Banks is describing as their peak. A group that just left one of the biggest names in the industry, still gaining six figures a month on two separate platforms, isn't the ceiling Banks described on X. It's a viral spike that came back down to a normal, still-positive growth line, which is a much less dramatic story than the one currently getting 481,000 views.

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