Kick Forces 720p Resolution Cap on Smaller Streamers Regardless of OBS Settings
Restricting 1920x1080p resolution streaming rights poses a serious problem for streamers who have been streaming on the Kick platform for a long time and maintain a small but dedicated audience of 3–5 viewers. Despite streaming consistently for months, their stream quality is automatically capped at 720p; even when 1080p is selected in software, the stream appears as 720p to viewers.
This situation is both demotivating and technically misleading, especially for streamers who invest significant time and effort into improving their stream quality. Streamers waste hours adjusting software or OBS settings believing the issue is on their end, when the problem actually stems from resolution restrictions imposed by the platform itself.
Kick support states that higher resolution streaming rights require higher viewer counts and engagement. However, because a 720p stream appears blurry, retaining viewers and boosting engagement becomes inherently difficult, creating a contradictory policy: engagement fails to grow because streamers cannot access high resolution, and high resolution isn't unlocked because engagement doesn't grow.
The goal of this complaint is to inform streamers facing similar issues that the problem originates from Kick's resolution policies rather than OBS or their own hardware, saving them from wasting hours tweaking technical settings. I demand that 1080p streaming capabilities be made available through more transparent and fair criteria for consistent streamers with smaller audiences, and that policies regarding resolution caps be communicated far more clearly to users.
