Scottish streamer Xenos, ‘the original Warzone singer’, has joined esports organisation Heroic as their first long-term content partner.
Xenos, also known as Sol, was born in Oban and currently lives just outside of Glasgow. After dropping out of university and walking away from a promising professional football career, he started gaining rapid popularity streaming battle-royale-style games like Call of Duty (CoD) Warzone.
Today he has over 2.6m followers across his platforms, including Twitch, YouTube and TikTok, with more than 2m followers on TikTok alone. His content pulls in hundreds of millions of views, and he is also one of few younger creators in Europe using Facebook, pulling in 25m views on the platform.
After a successful test run over the last few weeks, Heroic and Xenos have both decided to make their partnership a long-term deal.
Xenos has also managed to pull in significant viewers from the UK and outside of it, including from North and Latin American countries too, due to his talent for rapping in Spanish whilst playing in high-stakes games.
Alexander Johansson, CMO of Heroic, said: “We recently completed the signing of popular Scottish streamer and content creator Xenos to our organisation as part of our first proper venture into the content creation sphere.
“We’re very excited to partner with one of the fastest-growing streamers in Europe. His crazy plays and his even crazier raps are a great fit with our style and we can’t wait to work together more – watch this space!”
‘I’ve butchered hundreds of songs while playing CoD’ – five minutes with Xenos on becoming the Warzone singer
Congrats on the partnership, Xenos! I guess the obvious question is, where did you get the idea to start singing on stream?
Haha well I love singing in the shower, I always just kind of sung to myself under my breath. One day I was looking at my social media content, and realised it was kind flat and plateauing – I decided f**k it – let’s do something I love that no one else is doing.
So singing came about by me taking a ‘Hail Mary’ – taking my love for singing from the shower, to my stream.
I went from 8,000 followers to 500,000 followers in three months and that’s when I realised, wow, I found my thing.
From there it kind of snowballed and I tried my hand at other languages. I love languages, but I’ve never learnt any fluently – but I got into the habit of learning the lyrics of songs and raps (shoutout to Sean Paul’s ‘Temperature’) in other languages and that was so much fun. Portuguese, Punjabi, French, German, Spanish – I’ve butchered hundreds of songs while playing CoD and it’s not only fun, but really funny too.
How did you get into gaming and esports?
“I got into gaming by starting streaming when I was at uni, but over the course of my first two years, I started prioritising content over classes. In the space of 12 months I built up a small but dedicated community of viewers, so much so that the money I was making through gifts and subscriptions and donations, was enough to go full time.
That’s when I decided to drop out of uni and really go pro. A year and half later and I’m still growing my fanbase. Once my singing on stream took off, I started getting on the radar of some big teams and brands. That’s how I got into the world of esports and ultimately, why I‘ve partnered with Heroic.
Heroic are just as goofy as me, their jokes, their tone, their banter – they just get me – so if I was ever going to partner with anyone long-term, it’s them.
“I feel like Scotland, and the UK in general, are way behind on embracing esports and gaming as a part of our culture – especially compared to Eastern Europe and North America.”
Xenos, Heroic
What do you think about the Scottish gaming and esports ecosystem?
Scottish esports is extremely small – it barely exists and it’s such a shame. There’s so many talented people and players that could do more.
I feel like Scotland, and the UK in general, are way behind on embracing esports and gaming as a part of our culture – especially compared to Eastern Europe and North America.
When you think of esports and gaming, you think of Germany, America, Brazil, and Eastern Europe, but you don’t think of Scotland. Why not though? Why shouldn’t Scotland be one of those countries that becomes known for it? You shouldn’t have to leave home to make it big.
I would love to see a more formal structure to support homegrown talent; Scottish teams competing in Scottish tournaments – but how we go about doing that is a bigger question that I can’t answer on my own.
Related article: Interview with Sentinels Scottish Assistant Coach Drew ‘DrewSpark’ Spark-Whitworth
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
