Twitch bans Stake, Roobet and others (finally!)

[jasonuk]

It's been a long time coming, but Twitch have actually come up clutch with this announcement:

tweet is at twitter.com/Twitch/status/1572347129192132611 (have removed hyperlink as looks like the twitter plugin is butchering the link)

Text from the image announcement (errors my own):

Gambling content on Twitch has been a big topic of discussion in the community, and something we've been actively reviewing since our last policy update in this area. Today, we want to update you on our plans. While we prohibit sharing links or referral codes to all sites that include slots, roulette or dice games, we've seen some people circumvent those rules and expose our community to potential harm.

So we'll be making a policy update on October 18th to 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. These sites will include Stake.com, Rollbit.com, Duelbits.com, and Roobet.com. However, we may identify others as we move forward.

We will continue to allow websites that focus on sports betting, fantasy sports, and poker.

We'll share specifics on the updates to our Gambling policy soon, including the full policy language, to make sure everyone is clear on our new rules before they take effect on October 18th.

See Related Threads:

• Stake.com is Junk
• The End of Stake
• Stake Arrived on Casinomeister!
• Why You Should Never Play In Stake...
• Stake.com Unresponsive to Player Complaints

 

[sufferinsilence]

So they do this after the outrage because of a streamer who was scamming his subscribers, "lending" money from them to feed his gambling addiction. As far as I know he never streamed any gambling himself either.

Funny thing is he was (or is) addicted to sports betting yet they don't ban streaming sports betting They don't ban opening loot crates and whatever else on gaming streams that have an audience that is much younger either.

Good thing is that the ridiculous stakes will go, every slots streamer will have to go back to MGA or their own jurisdiction casinos that don't give out millions.

 

[jasonuk]

So they do this after the outrage because of a streamer who was scamming his subscribers, "lending" money from them to feed his gambling addiction. As far as I know he never streamed any gambling himself either.

Funny thing is he was (or is) addicted to sports betting yet they don't ban streaming sports betting They don't ban opening loot crates and whatever else on gaming streams that have an audience that is much younger either.

Good thing is that the ridiculous stakes will go, every slots streamer will have to go back to MGA or their own jurisdiction casinos that don't give out millions.

The toxicity has - at least for now - been largely contained to slots from crypto casinos on the list (plus a couple of others). I wouldn't expect sports betting to have the same dopamine impact because it's long-form betting (hours, days, weeks) rather than short-form (seconds) and it's much more difficult to "always win". If the problem spreads to poker or sports betting, then I imagine Twitch will (eventually) take further action if required.

I actually haven't seen many people stream sports betting - so while there will be a lot of focus on that angle, it's important it doesn't deflect from the rest of the story, including (allegedly) significant amounts of money being loaned by said faux-money slot streamers themselves, and a potential sponsorship from one of the casinos to possibly attempt to bury the story quickly.

Obviously any type of gambling addiction is an issue, and it's important people are aware of the tools and support out there in their respective jurisdiction. Saying "don't gamble" or other catchphrases once an hour while pounding the dopamine hits really doesn't cut it...

 

[sufferinsilence]

The toxicity has - at least for now - been largely contained to slots from crypto casinos on the list (plus a couple of others). I wouldn't expect sports betting to have the same dopamine impact because it's long-form betting (hours, days, weeks) rather than short-form (seconds) and it's much more difficult to "always win". If the problem spreads to poker or sports betting, then I imagine Twitch will (eventually) take further action if required.

I actually haven't seen many people stream sports betting - so while there will be a lot of focus on that angle, it's important it doesn't deflect from the rest of the story, including (allegedly) significant amounts of money being loaned by said faux-money slot streamers themselves, and a potential sponsorship from one of the casinos to possibly attempt to bury the story quickly.

Obviously any type of gambling addiction is an issue, and it's important people are aware of the tools and support out there in their respective jurisdiction. Saying "don't gamble" or other catchphrases once an hour while pounding the dopamine hits really doesn't cut it...

Ever tried live betting on tennis or basketball? It's basically the slots version of sports betting

Jokes aside, I've seen a couple of streams focused on sports betting and fantasy sports. I can't see it getting popular either but you never know with the new gambling regulations in a lot of US states. Sites like Fanduel might approach some of the big time streamers to make fantasy teams on their dime.

The big Curacao streamers will probably disappear: Trainwreck, xqc, man with the hat, whoever else I don't know about. But the regular slot streamers that play at MGA, UKGC,... licensed casinos should be fine. Perhaps the section will normalize again because $1000 a spin is just ridiculous.

 

[Video_Poker_Pro]

Wont they just go to youtube then?

 

[LoopsterAU]

They can finally stop stealing us real players who have guts to do bigger bets RTP using their fake money.

 

[LoopsterAU]

Also can see streamers from AU/NZ still playing at their regular places which even though they are not on this list I can guarantee they are all also using fake money including one that falls under Dama N.V. but others too. They will be trying to take advantage of the gap until they also hopefully get banned.
Hopefully they are keeping an eye on all of them and also notice the pattern of certain casinos and so many streamers doing ridiculous bet sizes all day long etc because it isn't hard to spot at all.

 

[nisosbar]

Wont they just go to youtube then?

Youtube censors. So they can try, but there won't be any point, because they'll just be shut down within days.

Separately, I'm not really sure what the big deal is about this. How much business does Twitch steer toward these casinos? While I imagine it's a significant percentage (more than 5%, but less than 20%), I'd have never heard of Rollbit or Duelbits if I hadn't read this press announcement. The Barbra Streisand effect.

And so Twitch will also censor. Rumble doesn't, I don't believe. Not sure about Vimeo or other streaming sites. TikTok or Telegraph...?

 

[jasonuk]

Wont they just go to youtube then?

That's the anticipated play, and some of them are already talking about doing just that.

Twitch was the favoured platform because it was much easier to be discovered and they could quickly latch on to popular streamers - by contrast, YouTube have been more hostile in that they banned gambling affiliation links in 2018 (3 years before Twitch) and started introducing age-gating features around 2020. I imagine if it kicks off over there again, they could similarly introduce new rules that heavily or totally restrict the availability of such livestreams.

Also can see streamers from AU/NZ still playing at their regular places which even though they are not on this list I can guarantee they are all also using fake money including one that falls under Dama N.V. but others too.

Time will tell on that one, and we'll have to see how Twitch enacts it going forward - Australia should be fairly simple for them to enforce because it's banned outright, other jurisdictions will probably need a combination of "licensed" and/or "sufficient consumer protection" to weed out the bad eggs...

We won't see results until after the 30 days expire, and no doubt there will be attempts to circumvent the rules - so I guess we'll have to see where things stand in November...

Separately, I'm not really sure what the big deal is about this. How much business does Twitch steer toward these casinos? While I imagine it's a significant percentage (more than 5%, but less than 20%), I'd have never heard of Rollbit or Duelbits if I hadn't read this press announcement. The Barbra Streisand effect.

It's frequently a top 10 category so it's getting a lot of eyeballs on Twitch through natural discovery (channel recommendations etc) - additionally some of them have been pushing crossovers into the real world (e.g. the Fake x Drake x Stake streams) to draw more viewers in. Pretty much all of the big streamers claim they're on seven figure monthly deals, so the net losses from players are going to be pretty staggering if remotely accurate.

I hadn't heard of those two either, I'm expecting Gamdom will get added to the list fairly quickly given they've been doing more of the same...

 

[Mr_Slot5]

Give it another 10 years and gambling advertising of any sort will be prohibited IMO. That’s the general direction it’s headed towards. These influencers will have to think on their feet and diversify into something else.

Then again if they’re on 7 figure monthly salaries then why not just retire and live life whilst at the best age to do so? If I had a few million in the bank I’d never work again, that’s for sure. I certainly wouldn’t be sat in front of a PC screen for hours on end.

 

[interlog]

About time too. It is the likes of the twat with the hat, that train wreck person et al that have been poisoning the casino section in Twitch for a while. They can now fuck right off doing their $1,000,000 fake money deposits and $1,000 spins and $50,000 bonus buys.

Well done @Stake too - you are complicit in this. Did you really think your irresponsible sponsoring of these streamers was not going to attract the platforms being used to promote your casino? You will now probably get your "stars" to use another platform to showcase their irresponsible and unrealisic gambling. Or will you have a change of heart and now stop it?

Maybe the Twitch casino section will get back to how it used to be. The good old times where £2 spins were considered highrolling.

 

[Bunbu]

Drama on twitch live, now hapening:
Pokimane to CorinnaKopf: "Now when you lost your job in illegal crypocasino, you can come work in me youtube editor team."
CorinnaKopf: "Bitch, i am making more money then you, milions"
(LMFAO)

And more drama, lol...almost all of the slot streamers streaming in moment and atacking other nonslot streamers...and cry i would say...

It is very amusing to watch it tbh... lol

 

[Bunbu]

About time too. It is the likes of the twat with the hat, that train wreck person et al that have been poisoning the casino section in Twitch for a while. They can now fuck right off doing their $1,000,000 fake money deposits and $1,000 spins and $50,000 bonus buys.

Well done @Stake too - you are complicit in this. Did you really think your irresponsible sponsoring of these streamers was not going to attract the platforms being used to promote your casino? You will now probably get your "stars" to use another platform to showcase their irresponsible and unrealisic gambling. Or will you have a change of heart and now stop it?

Maybe the Twitch casino section will get back to how it used to be. The good old times where £2 spins were considered highrolling.

Stake do not care, they done that what they planed, got bilions of USD/EUR in under 2 years becasue of stupidity/naivity of average human on Earth, now they can cashout all and close site.
(all of this stake scam is very simmilar to me to Onecoin scam (Ruza Ignjatova) - the way it is executed, with very smart way of advertising and propaganda - with small investments on Stake side...and not even their own money invested)

 

[jasonuk]

Stake do not care, they done that what they planed, got bilions of USD/EUR in under 2 years becasue of stupidity/naivity of average human on Earth, now they can cashout all and close site.
(all of this stake scam is very simmilar to me to Onecoin scam (Ruza Ignjatova) - the way it is executed, with very smart way of advertising and propaganda - with small investments on Stake side...and not even their own money invested)

The sad reality - despite this being a huge step forward, it's 18-24 months too late and a lot of the damage has already been done in terms of reputation, aggressively exploiting the viewer base and negative changes to regulatory frameworks worldwide. I doubt we'll ever get a "to date" (I nearly said "final", you know this nonsense will continue elsewhere) number in terms of how much money has been leeched from viewers (through fair means or foul), but it's certainly going to be scary...

 

[Bunbu]

The Drama!

 

[jasonuk]

I've had a look through the /slots category to generate some viewership numbers out of curiosity - as of around 45 minutes ago (2345 BST), there were 84.8k viewers across all the streams, of which 57 channels had 100 or more viewers:

Site	Status (from 18/10)	Count	Viewership	Notes
Stake	Explicitly banned	20 channels	56k (66%) / 49k (57%)	At least one channel blatantly viewbotting (3 day old account, 4k follows, 7k viewers, 20 in chat)
Gamdom	Implicitly banned	2 channels	7.5k (9%)
Rollbit	Explicitly banned	2 channels	5.2k (6%)
Roobet	Explicitly banned	1 channel	0.7k (1%)
Other Crypto	Probably banned	16 channels	6.2k (7%)
Real Money Streams	Probably OK	15 channels	5.1k (6%)
Demo Play		1 channel	0.2k	Yes, I actually found one ?
Under 100 viewers		155 channels	3.5k (4%)	Mostly crypto casinos or bot accounts

Admittedly this will be skewed slightly because some - but not all - of the European streamers have gone to bed, but around 90% of /slots viewership in the sample belong to channels that are expected to be banned under the new rules. Additionally, VirtualCasino (overlaying another video game) had 19k viewers with a similar mix of crypto streamers.

By comparison: Poker had 10k, Crypto (overlaying an old NES game) had 3k, and Sports (which includes everything, not just sports betting) had 11k viewers.

 

[sufferinsilence]

Xposed (Stake sponsored) streamed on Youtube yesterday whilst displaying a link on his Twitch directing viewers to YT.

I guess we can already see where this is going.

 

[LoopsterAU]

Xposed (Stake sponsored) streamed on Youtube yesterday whilst displaying a link on his Twitch directing viewers to YT.

I guess we can already see where this is going.

Even though its effectively gonna be a game of whack a mole between platforms I can tell you that as an Aussie who has been watching our government play whack a mole with all the casinos and blacklisting them at the domain level since 2017 only for new url's to popup etc. They then upped it to the providers to the point where we have just about no good ones left any more because the remaining few have also pulled out.

Whack a mole doesn't get an instant result but eventually it becomes that pointless to do it that the person doing it doesn't even wanna do it any more because its simply not worth it.

 

[sufferinsilence]

Even though its effectively gonna be a game of whack a mole between platforms I can tell you that as an Aussie who has been watching our government play whack a mole with all the casinos and blacklisting them at the domain level since 2017 only for new url's to popup etc. They then upped it to the providers to the point where we have just about no good ones left any more because the remaining few have also pulled out.

Whack a mole doesn't get an instant result but eventually it becomes that pointless to do it that the person doing it doesn't even wanna do it any more because its simply not worth it.

At least Youtube has age-gating unlike Twitch...

I don't know what's going to happen but streaming gambling on Twitch isn't going to disappear completely, and it shouldn't for those that play by the rules. We'll see what the specifics are that they'll be releasing in the upcoming weeks.

 

[casguy2016]

I've had a look through the /slots category to generate some viewership numbers out of curiosity - as of around 45 minutes ago (2345 BST), there were 84.8k viewers across all the streams, of which 57 channels had 100 or more viewers:

Site	Status (from 18/10)	Count	Viewership	Notes
Stake	Explicitly banned	20 channels	56k (66%) / 49k (57%)	At least one channel blatantly viewbotting (3 day old account, 4k follows, 7k viewers, 20 in chat)
Gamdom	Implicitly banned	2 channels	7.5k (9%)
Rollbit	Explicitly banned	2 channels	5.2k (6%)
Roobet	Explicitly banned	1 channel	0.7k (1%)
Other Crypto	Probably banned	16 channels	6.2k (7%)
Real Money Streams	Probably OK	15 channels	5.1k (6%)
Demo Play		1 channel	0.2k	Yes, I actually found one ?
Under 100 viewers		155 channels	3.5k (4%)	Mostly crypto casinos or bot accounts

Admittedly this will be skewed slightly because some - but not all - of the European streamers have gone to bed, but around 90% of /slots viewership in the sample belong to channels that are expected to be banned under the new rules. Additionally, VirtualCasino (overlaying another video game) had 19k viewers with a similar mix of crypto streamers.

By comparison: Poker had 10k, Crypto (overlaying an old NES game) had 3k, and Sports (which includes everything, not just sports betting) had 11k viewers.

honestly i'd rather watch demo play than the scam streamers. as well i'd rather someone else do demo play than do demo play myself. i'd just be ticked off if i got a huge win on demo play instead of real money

 

[Guntis]

I think the day will come when someone sets up something called GamblersHub, a totally separate platform from general things, where all streamers will have to pay a fee to stream on this site, and access will be restricted to those aged less than 18.

 

[Kroffe]

I think the day will come when someone sets up something called GamblersHub, a totally separate platform from general things, where all streamers will have to pay a fee to stream on this site, and access will be restricted to those aged less than 18.

I think thats the way it should have been done in the first place.
Mainly talking about a separate platform, not the fees.

Makes no sense to have it on Twitch where i assume the average viewer is not even old enough to gamble.
Its too late now, but twitch would be better if they never allowed all the soft-core porn and gambling.
If 20-30 year old men were being sexual towards teenage girls and selling them weird crap it would be shut down before you had the time to blink, but for some reason its ok when 20-30 year old women do the same to teenage boys.
Its creepy.

 

[Guntis]

Makes no sense to have it on Twitch where i assume the average viewer is not even old enough to gamble.

Many streamers are laying down their future! I very rarely visit Twitch, but i remember seeing some on YouTube making large donations to popular game streamers in order to make their underage viewers come to see who was that madman donating such amounts of money. Both streamers, in reality, of course, can be "friends", so the donated money gets given back.

I believe that seeing one screaming, shouting, and swearing while spinning a fancy real money slot machine may look very appealing to many underage boys, and when they turn 18, they may try repeating the same and possibly looking for that man who they once saw on YouTube.

 

[Davey86]

I think the day will come when someone sets up something called GamblersHub, a totally separate platform from general things, where all streamers will have to pay a fee to stream on this site, and access will be restricted to those aged less than 18.

The casino grounds mob said that was in the works about a year or 2 ago they wer supposedly building their own platform nick and Kim mentioned it a few times on streams, don’t know how far it got to the development stage, the trouble they had got on YouTube streamers started to get a bit twitchy

 

[jasonuk]

Makes no sense to have it on Twitch where i assume the average viewer is not even old enough to gamble.

It's tough to put exact numbers on, because what little data exists is inherently unreliable - but the average age across all of the platform seems to be in the early 20s - something like 1 in 5 are under 18, and 2 in 5 are under 21.

This will vary wildly by game and streamer - which is the problem with the faux-money headliners because their audiences tend to skew younger. One of them tried naively to "prove" their audience was 97% over 18 (3% 13-17, 41% 18-24, 40% 25-34, 16% 35+) but was promptly deleted after the community ripped it apart and pointed out all it proved was that people lie on surveys.

The casino grounds mob said that was in the works about a year or 2 ago they wer supposedly building their own platform nick and Kim mentioned it a few times on streams, don’t know how far it got to the development stage, the trouble they had got on YouTube streamers started to get a bit twitchy

I assume infrastructure (and particularly bandwidth) costs would be astronomical here and the biggest reason why they haven't - 720p video consumes roughly 1GB/hr, multiply by 1000 concurrent viewers and 8 hours - that's 8TB of data, which at published Amazon rates would cost $680 for one stream! Obviously they'll find cheaper alternatives, but even at 50%, 60% or 70% discount it's still a significant overhead.

Many streamers are laying down their future! I very rarely visit Twitch, but i remember seeing some on YouTube making large donations to popular game streamers in order to make their underage viewers come to see who was that madman donating such amounts of money. Both streamers, in reality, of course, can be "friends", so the donated money gets given back.

I believe that seeing one screaming, shouting, and swearing while spinning a fancy real money slot machine may look very appealing to many underage boys, and when they turn 18, they may try repeating the same and possibly looking for that man who they once saw on YouTube.

They've pulled a lot of tricks like that, and it's very easy - and justified - to be cynical about it. Even with the latest incident with Sliker, Ludwig is getting a lot of praise for reimbursing the victims, but people are giving XQC a frosty reception because it feels like a publicity stunt to appease his "guilt".

Also not "when they turn 18"... if you have a read of the Stake review here on CM, you'll see how lax their KYC processes are and similarly a blurb provided by the company on Responsible Gambling and it's - excuse my language - absolute horseshit... not only do they claim it's not possible to implement said functionality (that other crypto casinos have) but they make you jump through multiple hoops (manually, over time) for the few that they do offer. I can't imagine why that would be...