After a whirlwind week that started with a Twitch streamer scamming his fans and other creators out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and only escalated from there, Twitch has finally cracked down on gambling. But after initially celebrating a total ban, streamers are beginning to realize Twitch’s language isn’t as ironclad as it seems.
Twitch is an Amazon-owned live-streaming platform with an
audience of around 31 million visitors per day. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos,
owns The Washington Post.) The site has long turned a blind eye to gambling
streams, in which streamers functionally advertise gambling websites to an
audience that skews young: Twitch says nearly 75 percent of its viewers are
between the ages of 16 and 34. Around 6-9 percent of young people struggle with
gambling compared to 1 percent of adults, according to the National Center for
Responsible Gaming.
In a tweet published Tuesday evening, Twitch announced that
beginning in October, it will “prohibit streaming of gambling sites that
include slots, roulette or dice games that aren’t licensed either in the U.S.
or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection.” Such sites
include Stake.com, Rollbit.com, Duelbits.com and Roobet.com according to the
announcement — all of which partnered with popular Twitch streamers or
otherwise had a presence on the platform. The tweet included a carveout for
websites focused on sports betting, fantasy sports and poker.
This strikes a blow to casino-style betting, which has
become big business on Twitch in the past several years. The formula is simple:
Streamers visit a gambling website and exchange real money for cryptocurrency,
which they can bet on simple games of chance like slots and roulette. Viewers
tune in to vicariously experience the thrill of being a high roller, with
wealthy streamers dropping tens or hundreds of thousands — and sometimes more —
to very occasionally win millions.
As early as 2018, Twitch’s casino section contained numerous
channels of questionable repute, some of which inflated their viewer counts
with bots to advertise specific slots gambling websites. Over time, this grew
into a more influencer-driven strategy, with the relative success of longtime
slots streamers like Ishmael “Roshtein” Swartz luring bigger names like
gamer-turned-gambler Tyler “Trainwrecks” Niknam and Twitch king Félix “xQc”
Lengyel.
Sites like Stake struck deals with Twitch-grown
personalities like Niknam and Lengyel, with Niknam saying he pulls in over $1
million per month from his Stake sponsorship alone. Another popular gambling
regular, Adin Ross, seemingly receives nearly that much per week. Even Drake,
the rapper, got in on the action with his own Stake deal for an undisclosed
sum.
For a time, streamers paired those sponsorships with links
to gambling sites and referral codes; Twitch banned those additional
advertising and moneymaking methods last year. This change arose from a
staff-led movement to curtail gambling on the platform, according to former
Twitch employees who chose to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal. The ban
ultimately did little to curtail gambling.
Many streamers have grown uncomfortable with gambling’s
increasingly prominent place on the platform, viewing broadcasts as a gateway
to real-money gambling for impressionable viewers already familiar with
gambling-inspired mechanics in and around games like “Counter-Strike,” “Genshin
Impact,” and the FIFA series’s Ultimate Team mode, among others.
Moreover, there’s another, bigger issue: Some streamers are
breaking the law by gambling on Stake, given that crypto gambling is illegal in
the United States. To circumvent this, Niknam first used a virtual private
network to spoof being in another country; when even that proved untenable, he
uprooted his life and moved to Canada, where online gambling laws are less
stringent, in 2021. There, he continued to gamble on Twitch nearly every day
while swearing up and down that others should not do so. In January, he said he
was “down” $12.9 million due to gambling.
Nonetheless, he and others like Lengyel who claim to have
become “addicted” stick with it, hoping that their warnings — and charitable
efforts like Niknam’s partnership with mental health-focused nonprofit Rise
Above The Disorder — will be enough to offset damage done by their lucrative
yet destructive career turns. It’s a move that mirrors entities in the sports
betting space like the NFL, which has poured $6 million into the National
Council on Problem Gambling despite partnering with sports betting sites like
DraftKings and FanDuel. With Twitch, the effectiveness of this approach is
debatable. In August, Bloomberg published a report on Twitch viewers who’ve
lost tens of thousands of dollars to gambling sites after watching their
favorite streamers try their luck day in and day out.
All of this culminated in a week of pure chaos on Twitch. On
Saturday, a streamer who goes by the handle ItsSliker (who has not publicized
his real name) admitted to borrowing money from other streamers — including big
names like political pundit Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker and Niknam — under false
pretenses, claiming his bank account had been frozen or his Twitch payments
hadn’t come through and he just needed money to keep his head above water. He
failed to pay friends back for months or years; he had gambled away around
$200,000.
During a confession stream, ItsSliker said he got started in
the popular competitive shooter “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” which
contains cosmetic weapon and item skins with real-money value that third-party
sites use like casino chips. For him, this was a funnel into sports gambling,
on which he spent “basically all” of the money he earned through Twitch.
“I deserve punishment. Whatever happens, happens,” he said.
“I don’t know what to say to the people I borrowed from.”
Despite the fact that ItsSliker’s apparent addiction
centered around sports gambling — whose boom has concerned addiction experts
since a 2018 Supreme Court decision made it a state-by-state issue and which
remains allowed on Twitch — his admission sparked another community-wide
discussion of casino-style gambling’s potential impacts on impressionable
viewers. Top streamers Imane “Pokimane” Anys and Matthew “Mizkif” Rinaudo,
alongside agency head and industry insider Devin Nash, ended up discussing a
possible solution during a Sunday stream: to rally other top creators to
boycott Twitch during the week of Christmas, an especially profitable time for
the company.
The resulting clip caught fire on Twitch, Twitter and
YouTube, prompting a series of increasingly incendiary debates that culminated
in Rinaudo saying Niknam should be banned from Twitch, at which point Niknam
replied by alleging Rinaudo had previously covered up an instance of sexual
assault perpetrated by one of his friends against a fellow streamer. One True
King, the streamer-led gaming organization Rinaudo co-owns, suspended him
Tuesday evening and promised a third-party investigation. Rinaudo, meanwhile,
has issued an apology.
Amid further increasingly personal mudslinging between big
names prompted by this conflict — which audiences ate up with voyeuristic glee
across Twitch and Twitter, as well as the 1.5 million-user subreddit
Livestreamfail — Twitch made its announcement. Gambling beneficiaries like Ross
did not take the news well, while others like Anys and Piker celebrated on
Twitter. In August, Twitch told Bloomberg that it was in the midst of a
“deep-dive look into gambling behavior.” But when asked by The Washington Post
what that investigation found and how much it factored into this week’s rule
change — as opposed to recent outcry from big-name streamers — a Twitch
spokesperson said the company’s rule change announcement would be its only
statement on the matter for the time being.
But just because Twitch’s policy update looks like a ban and
talks like a ban, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a ban.
“Soon it will hit people that gambling is not banned on Twitch;
only sites incompliant with U.S. regulations will be removed on the 18th of
October,” said Twitch star turned YouTube streamer Ben “DrLupo” Lupo.
“Unfortunately under these updates slots, roulette and dice
gambling still can live on Twitch, just in their diluted form on U.S.-licensed
websites,” Nash told The Washington Post, noting that even Stake has a U.S.
version, albeit one that does not require real money to play games. “The good
news is, we might see more consumer protections built in from those websites,
but the bad news is gambling is still here to stay even under the updated
policy. Twitch still needs to do more work to acknowledge the harm gambling
does to their audience and take a total stand against luck-based gambling.”
That could prove difficult, however, due to the growing
normalization of gambling in America. Gambling-like mechanics are prominent in
popular video games, and Twitch’s parent company, Amazon, has made forays into
the world of gambling, including a multiyear partnership with sports betting
site DraftKings as part of its $13 billion Thursday Night Football deal with
the NFL.
Christine Reilly, senior research director at the
International Center for Responsible Gaming, thinks what happens next will
depend on Twitch.
“There is very little research about the relationship
between illegal gambling and gambling disorder,” she said. “Restricting access
to sites that are regulated could be helpful, but consumer protections tend to
vary in the online space. I’d be interested to know how [Twitch] defines
consumer protection — do [gambling sites] allow customers to self-exclude,
track transactions and send warning messages if excessive gambling is detected,
or provide information on getting help with gambling problems?”
Nash, too, believes the ball is now in Twitch’s court — but
that streamers and viewers should be ready to catch it when it’s thrown back
their way.
“In its current wording, this isn’t even close to a
luck-based gambling ban,” he sad. “We must hold Twitch accountable as a
platform to do the right thing, since they only seem to respond to
extraordinary pressure.”
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