Twitch, a popular streaming website, has a gambling problem. A “problem” is an understatement. From Trainwrecks to xQc, many of Twitch’s most popular streamers showcase their gambling addictions live in front of thousands of viewers at a time. They can spend hours playing roulette, slots, and dice. This issue of gambling recently exploded within the Twitch community when Sliker, a Twitch streamer with 432 thousand followers, revealed that he had scammed many of his close friends, colleagues, and fans out of thousands to keep gambling.
After this announcement, an onslaught of personal accounts emerged with victims stating that Sliker had falsified a locked out bank account to scam them out of sympathy into sending money. The total amount taken was said to be more than 300k. With the event having such an impact on Twitch, viewers and streamers alike began to rally for the banning of gambling sites from their platform. They argued that by giving gambling streams an audience, the gambling addictions of many streamers are exacerbated. These streams were also said to be dangerous for impressionable Twitch viewers, who could become addicts themselves. Well, on September 20th, 2022, Twitch decided to crack down on gambling streams once and for all, banning all gambling content from their website for good.
But how will this affect your regularly scheduled content from streamers like xQc or Trainwrecks?
Well for one, although these bans may discourage streamers from gambling on Twitch for a net profit (from donations and subs), there’s nothing stopping those that are truly addicted from simply betting behind the scenes. As an example, xQc on stream 2 months ago admitted to have wagered $685 million across 650,000 bets on a popular online gambling website called Stake. The issue with Stake as a gambling service is that as part of a contract with many Twitch streamers including xQc, Stake willingly pays Twitch streamers $1 million to bet on their website live. Now, these streamers can bet freely, fuel their addictions, and even receive donations while they’re doing it. Surprisingly, losing money from bad bets on streams may in the end turn into a profit for the streamer. If you look up xQc with “gambling losses” on google, you’ll be met with a myriad of articles explaining his 1 million, 2 million, 170k, and more losses. These losses never seem to faze him, however, and he’s adamantly been doing sponsored gambling streams for a bit under 2 years now. The ban, while it may suck to have to stray from a main source of revenue, is not his content’s main focus, and will not affect xQc very much financially as long as he doesn’t keep gambling exorbitant amounts of money off stream.
Let’s look at popular streamer TrainWrecks. Over the past year and a half, a majority of his streams have been purely him with sponsored gamblng, and unlike xQc, he is to be affected greatly by the gambling ban. Trainwrecks is a streamer that has primarily relied on his gambling streams for profit and growth, and now that his viewerbase watches his content only for these gambling streams, it may become more difficult to find another Twitch meta.
Trainwrecks winning in slots. [Image from Gamer Empire]
It seems, however, that he doesn’t plan on slowing down any time soon. With twitch only banning gambling through dice games, slots, and roulette, Trainwrecks in a recent stream with another streamer named Destiny asserts that he’ll be migrating towards more niche ways of gambling, such as sports betting, poker, fantasy sports, and more. (Like the many csgo gambling websites)
While the banning of gambling seems to be a step in the right direction for many viewers, It may be a long time before Twitch is fully rid of sponsored gambling streams.
Tags: Culture
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