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Casinos for you
Twitch CEO Gives Regulated Gambling Streams the Green Light
By Shane Addinall Jun 04, 2023 OpinionJoin us as we delve into the background of Twitch’s gambling stream bans and their view of unlicensed casinos. We also look at his ignorance of crypto casinos’ challenges versus being a predatory unlicensed site.October 2022 was a topsy-turvy time for online gambling and its future on Twitch’s global live-streaming platform. Until that point, streamers were playing various casino games on sites such as Stake without much concern for licensing or the local gambling regulations of their viewers. This came to a grinding halt when Twitch suddenly banned gambling content.
The Ban Had Very Poor Optics
One of the reasons the ban on gambling content created such uproar was the optics. It didn't feel like Twitch was trying to do anything good. Still, it was instead bending the knee to some prominent streamers like Pokimane, who had gone on a self-righteous tirade tarring the gambling industry as a whole as problematic.
The kneejerk response from Twitch also did not appear to consider that the online gambling industry is a well-regulated and tightly managed sector. They only said that non-licensed or unregulated casinos in the US or other jurisdictions that do not "provide sufficient consumer protection" would be prohibited.
Twitch Loses Subs and Streamers
The ban led to Stake launching Kick.com, which welcomes gambling streams and is not concerned with DMCA strikes as it is not reliant on advertisers for revenue. While Kick is far smaller than Twitch, it has recruited large-name streamers like Trainwreckz and Adin Ross. It also offers a 90%/10% revenue split for streamers, which is far more attractive than Twitch.
Twitch has also faced a lot of backlash from its community, primarily due to what is being labelled predatory term updates. It has come to light that the platform is a loss leader and is under pressure to become a profit centre, which it has attempted to achieve by cancelling its 70%/30% revenue share deal, limiting it to 50%/50%.
It also became far more insistent that streamers run a range of ad types, most of which focus on pre-roll advertisements. This means that upon visiting a new stream, a potential fan must sit through several ads before seeing a streamer in action. This action has led to a significant loss in new subscribers for existing content creators and a more challenging path to affiliate for would-be full-time streamers.
Twitch Walks Back Its Hard Stance
Despite how easily Twitch dropped the ban hammer on the content niche, the slots section on Twitch was a vibrant and growing channel at one point. The recent pressures the company has faced could have led the CEO to discuss their “true intentions” behind the ban.
Speaking to a popular content creator, Filian, the CEO of Twitch, Dan Clancy, clarified that the platform never had a problem with gambling content – only content creators who were driving viewers to unregulated online casinos.
Quote“In general, there’s no problem with streaming gambling. We do have a problem with you streaming on unregulated third-party sites.”
Explaining their logic, he added:
Quote“These sites, there’s nobody overlooking to see, for example, what are the odds on the tables. Do they tweak them? Do they change them? They’re not regulated. It seems they can decide what they want to do. There is a reason you have to VPN in.”
While most of the online gambling community would agree with Clancy's vision for a safer gambling community, he failed to consider that the sites they targeted by name are not regarded as untrustworthy.
Stake casino was explicitly named in their documentation as a key example of the type of site they wanted to ban. However, Stake is a cryptocurrency casino, and its challenges around licensing stem from its focus on crypto rather than its trustworthiness as an operator.
In fact, given provably fair gambling, crypto casinos offer players more tools to verify on-server game results than their fiat currency counterparts.
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