Variety streamer Ludwig Agren's "never-ending" Subathon Twitch feed is now in its 12th day, and, lo and behold, it will end this weekend. As of this writing, Ludwig's chat of 36,000 viewers is fighting to keep the timer above 18 hours by adding another 10 seconds per subscription. The streamer's efforts have made him now Twitch's most subscribed channel, with 120,000 total subscribers, the second highest total ever (behind Ninja's peak of 269,000).

And Ludwig looks tired.

He eats, sleeps, and sometimes showers in front of thousands of spectators. Ludwig and his team eventually limited the number of subscriptions a single user could purchase to 100 (equivalent to $500). The cap feels like a gentle nudge to end streaming, which will likely bring in more than $500,000 in revenue overall. [Ludwig has a trip scheduled for tomorrow, March 27, which will force him to leave the stream for the first time in nearly 300 hours. How much his sub-count increases in the next 12 hours will likely determine the final outcome.

At the current pace (18 hours seems to have turned into 17 hours), the timer will reach zero on Saturday morning. And Ludwig's crew is drawing up a rough plan in case there is still a rush of subtitles when Ludwig departs. Ludwig's crew is drawing up a rough plan in case they are still inundated with subtitles when Ludwig departs.

Streamer Slime (Ludwig's roommate) takes over the subson in Ludwig's absence and sleeps in the stream in the bed of Ludwig's race car. Slime said, "I understand this is Ludwig's stream, but we're in a strange place." '[Ludwig's] viewers necessarily want to see slime. They're like, 'Who the hell is this bald guy? That's really annoying." Ludwig said, "You are my Horcrux, and I don't want to die."

If the timer is about to reach zero while Ludwig is away, his team is instructed to stop when the timer reaches one hour. Slime said in an update this morning, "And when [Ludwig] comes back, the sub-a-thon comes back up like Donkey Kong and another hour starts." Off-screen, Ludwig adds, "It's like the last lap of Mario Kart."

It is quite possible that this theoretical conclusion could be extended by two or three days; at 10 seconds per subscription, it would take about 8,600 subscriptions to extend the timer for a full day. A major reason the stream has already lasted so long is that Ludwig's subson is designed to collect waves of subscriptions at key milestones. At the bottom of each hour on the timer, the numbers begin to flash red like a doomsday clock. This slight change catches the eye of tens of thousands of viewers and attracts enough new subscribers to rise again a few minutes later. (It is now 17:45:44, and it appears that 17 may not last long, as the video is now at 17:45:44, and the video is now at 17:45:44, and the video is now at 17:45:44.)

Outside of the video itself, Twitch's built-in tricks to extract more money from viewers are working hard. Each time the hype train starts up in the chat, viewers show up with bits and subscriptions to fill any progress bar, and Ludwig often gets 300 or 400 percent of his initial "goal."

I could speculate all day, but the beauty of this already historic stream is that the end is always in sight until the end is out of sight. The mystery is part of the fun, and it's not a bad idea to see how Ludwig plays out his mood at the time. Even if there is a payday at the end of the tunnel, I don't think he is charismatic enough to stay "on" for 12, 13, or even 14 days straight. Ludwig seems to be coping well (he seems to be getting 8 hours of sleep each night), but after almost two weeks, it seems like a welcome break from home for a day before it finally ends.

probably before it's over. After another push on the subscription a few minutes ago, the timer is already back to where it was when I started writing this: 17 hours, 53 minutes.