Auronplay

Raúl Álvarez Genes — Auronplay — is Spanish YouTube’s defining voice: the creator who turned sarcastic video commentary into a national pastime. Born in Badalona, Catalonia, on November 5, 1988, he started uploading in 2006, took the name Auronplay from Auron of Final Fantasy X, and proceeded to become one of the biggest entertainers the Spanish-speaking internet has ever produced.

The backstory is as working-class as they come. At sixteen, Álvarez went to work at a graphic arts and bookbinding company, where he stayed for nine years. He quit in 2013 — the year YouTube started paying him more than the print shop. That decision, made before “creator” was a career anyone’s parents understood, is the whole Auronplay thesis in one move: bet on the audience before the audience is obvious.

His early fame came from comedy. Short, caustic commentary videos — viral fails, absurd trends, the daily theater of the internet — delivered in a deadpan that made him Spain’s reigning roastmaster. The numbers compounded brutally: one million subscribers in 2015, five million in 2017, and a climb that never really plateaued. Today the main channel sits at roughly 29 million subscribers with more than four billion total views, making him one of the most-subscribed creators in all of Spain.

Then came the second act. In February 2019, Auronplay started streaming on Twitch, and his very first broadcast peaked at over 100,000 concurrent viewers — a Spanish-language record at the time. A twelve-hour Minecraft marathon pulled in 270,000 live viewers. He never really left. With around 17 million Twitch followers, he operates the fourth most-followed channel on the entire platform, regularly drawing six-figure live audiences for everything from GTA roleplay to Among Us lobbies to Fall Guys chaos.

What he built next was bigger than a channel: it was infrastructure. Auronplay became the engine behind Tortillaland, the Minecraft roleplay series that functioned as a prestige TV season for Spanish-language streaming, drawing together the scene’s biggest names in a shared world with real stakes and real storylines. He co-created and headlined Squid Craft Games — the Spanish-language answer to Squid Game, played in Minecraft — which became one of the most-watched events in Twitch history, pulling millions of concurrent viewers and dominating the global conversation for weeks. These weren’t streams; they were cultural events, organized with the production discipline of a network and the chaos of a group chat.

The collaboration web is the other half of the story. Auronplay’s orbit includes ElRubius, Ibai Llanos, and TheGrefg — the triumvirate of Spanish streaming — and his on-screen chemistry with each of them has produced some of the most clipped, memed, and rewatched moments in the language. His banter with Ibai in particular helped define the tone of an entire era: two friends, millions of viewers, zero script, and the feeling that anything could happen.

The road hasn’t been smooth. Auronplay’s humor — irreverent, politically incorrect, deliberately abrasive — has drawn backlash and genuine controversy more than once, and he’s taken extended breaks from streaming when the noise got too loud, including time away that he later addressed directly with his audience. But the pattern of his career is return, not retreat: he comes back, the numbers come back, and the audience — which has now been watching him for the better part of two decades — is still there.

That longevity is the real story. Auronplay has now been a fixture of Spanish internet culture since 2006 — through the sketch era, the gaming boom, the Twitch takeover, and the event-streaming age — and he adapted to every single one without losing the thing that made him: a kid from Badalona with a sharp tongue and perfect comic timing. From a bookbinding shop to the fourth-biggest Twitch channel on Earth, he didn’t just ride the Spanish-language internet’s rise. He is the reason it rose.

The trophy case filled up along the way. Auronplay took home Streamer of the Year at the 2021 MTV MIAW Awards and Gamer MVP at the Kids’ Choice Awards Mexico the same year — mainstream validation for a career built outside every mainstream channel. He’s become a fixture of the Kings League universe and the broader Spanish creator economy, a perennial headliner at events like the ESLAND awards, and one of the few streamers whose name alone can move the needle on a game’s launch. Squid Craft returned for a second edition; Tortillaland kept expanding its cast; every event he touches inherits his audience’s total, almost unreasonable loyalty.

Through it all, the persona never calcified. Auronplay’s streams still feel like hanging out with the funniest person in the group chat — unscripted, unfiltered, and allergic to polish. That’s the rarest trick in entertainment: growing from a masked teenager uploading sketches in 2006 to a 29-million-subscriber institution without ever sounding like an institution. The bookbinding shop is long behind him. The audience he built, one sarcastic video at a time, is still laughing.