Attention is back on gambling at Twitch after an article about the controversial activity appeared on news site Bloomberg. Over the years, gambling streams at the platform have grown hugely popular. It turns out that “slots” are the seventh most watched category at Twitch according to TwitchTracker, thus beating out video games such as Fortnite, World of Warcraft, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Driving the popularity of online gambling streams are content creators such as xQc and Trainwreckstv. Streamers have been lured away from playing video games to creating gambling content, potentially influencing underage viewers in the process. Top Twitch gamblers aren’t just playing slots or blackjack for fun but are doing so to promote sites such as Stake in alleged multi-million-dollar deals.
One is former professional Overwatch player Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel, who claimed in May to have brought in over $100 million to Stake via a promotion code. One of the attractions of these streams is the huge bets being placed, and in a recent broadcast, xQc lost $164,000 worth of crypto in just over two minutes. However, sponsored streamers are able to offset big losses to a degree from highly lucrative deals that are not available to regular viewers.
As such, there has been a major backlash, which has encouraged Twitch’s investigation into gambling content at the site. One Twitch spokesperson told Bloomberg that the platform is ‘currently in the midst of a deep-dive look into gambling behaviour on Twitch.’ What exactly this means in actionable terms is unclear at the moment, but the spokesperson went on to say, ‘We take any potential harm to our community extremely seriously,’ and ‘While gambling content represents a very small fraction of the content streamed on Twitch, we monitor it closely to ensure our approach mitigates potential harm to our global community.’
Twitch has made moves in the past, such as disallowing links or referral codes, in an attempt to ‘address scams and other harms associated with questionable gaming sites’. However, some don’t see this as going far enough and have called for Twitch to ban gambling streams outright.
Matthew ‘Mizkif’ Rinaudo, famous for his World of Warcraft content, said he was offered $19 million per year to live gamble on Twitch in front of his viewers. After seeing one of his 14-year-old fans gambling at a site he promoted, Mizkif stopped ‘because I just felt genuinely bad,’ he told Bloomberg. He also told the news site that as long as Twitch provides a platform for streamers to promote gambling sites, content creators will continue to do so – ‘Streamers are going to gamble… because they’re getting paid to do it.’
So are the days of gambling at Twitch numbered? For now, it’s impossible to say just how far Twitch will go to address the concerns that have been brewing for a while. The controversy shows no sign of blowing over any time soon, though, so eyes are on the results of Twitch’s deep dive.
