Sitting in the middle of the current gambling controversy on Twitch is Canadian streamer Felix Lengyel, commonly known as ‘xQc’. In June 2021, xQc publicly quit streaming gambling due to being ‘slightly, if not moderately, addicted’ and apologised for ‘hardcore exposing it to people.’
The content creator’s break ended after a bout of playing slots during a stream in May 2022. This caused a round of consternation amongst observers who think streamers have a duty as role models. xQc justified the flip saying he’d grown frustrated with being singled out while fellow streamers got a pass to promote gambling. After ‘malding’ at the apparent injustice, xQc decided he’d had enough and leapt back in. He’s even taken back his apology for gambling. ‘I apologised because people led me to believe there was a problem. I was wrong. There isn’t any problem. Sorry for apologising.’
His motivation to return was certainly not to be a role model – xQc has made this clear. ‘I’m not here to be a role model. I’m here to have some fun, so I’ll do it until it becomes boring. Turn the computer off and go speak with your parents and peers if you want a role model for your moral compass.’ This has rubbed fellow streamers such as Myth up the wrong way, who claim they should care about viewer welfare.
xQc hammered home his point by pointing out his streams just wouldn’t be what they are if he tried to be a role model, using video games to highlight his argument; ‘I would never play games more than six hours at a time, because that promotes addiction to video games and it ruins your life, it ruins a lot of peoples’ lives… People repress their lives because they play too many games.’ xQc added that his streams would be cut short so he could ‘go to bed earlier, give up drinking and stop eating fast food.’
Not everyone’s buying the argument. In reference to xQc comparing gambling to microtransactions in video games, fellow streamer Pokimane had this to say: ‘Just because other things that are less bad are legal, the means we should allow worse things? That’s such terrible logic for a society.’
Opinions on who is responsible for stopping potentially ‘harmful’ streaming is split between those who blame the streamers making money from it and others who prefer Twitch to step in. For now, despite the concern, there is no word of Twitch making any moves to restrict gambling content or make changes to the site’s terms.
