Recently, Bloomberg published an article where the issue of gambling in streaming was raised once again. Well-known streamers broadcast games in online casinos as a form of highly paid advertisements and introduce their large audience to this controversial area of entertainment. While one can approach the rising popularity of gambling from different standpoints, Streams Charts will inspect it from the perspective of Twitch viewership statistics.
While in January 2019 Slots broadcasts attracted 9K Average Viewers, by August 2022 this indicator had increased by more than sevenfold – to 66K Average Viewers. At the same time, the Slots audience generated less than 1% of Twitch’s total Hours Watched at the beginning of 2021, and today this figure is already at 2.7%.
The first huge leap in popularity of gambling on Twitch happened in May 2021, when it started receiving a lot of attention from xQc and Trainwreckstv. In October of the same year, the performance of Slots dropped significantly. This happened due to this month’s Worlds 2021 in LoL, The International 10 in Dota 2, and PGL Major Stockholm 2021 in CS:GO, as well as the September release of New World and FIFA 22, which redirected the attention of both the audience and streamers themselves.
In 2022, the performance of Slots is growing every month, aside from a small decrease in April. In July, the category generated a record 45M Hours Watched and entered the month’s top 10 for the third time in a row. It should be noted that Felix xQc Lengyel, who resumed casino broadcasts in May 2022 after a long break, has greatly contributed to this. In one and a half weeks of August, Slots has generated more than 16.4M Hours Watched and is ranked eighth in the top most popular categories of the month on Twitch.
Media personalities are the main promoters of Internet gambling, but sometimes they themselves fall into the trap of gambling addiction. For example, on the May podcast of the popular streamer Imane “Pokimane” Anys, xQc admitted that playing in the casino brings him a lot of joy and he can easily lose more than $1M per month. According to xQc, his sponsor earn about $119M with the help of his viewers who used xQc's promo code. At the same time, many streamers admit that casino streams bring them several tens of thousands of dollars per hour, which makes for more than $1M per month.
Based on xQc's statements, it is clear that viewers often follow the example of streamers and also play in the casino. Someone wins, someone loses, and someone's life becomes completely derailed due to the development of addiction. In order to somehow protect its users from the desire to register in an online casino, Twitch banned streamers from sharing links and promotional codes with viewers.
Since placing the casino promo codes on Twitch is impossible, creators do this on their social networks instead. At the same time, almost all the most watched streamers in the Slots category cooperate with a single platform. As of today, three biggest gambling creators on Twitch are ROSHTEIN and Trainwreckstv (who specialize in Slots broadcasts), as well as xQc (for whom this category is not the main one).
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Gambling is growing in popularity and is being streamed by some of the most watched streamers on Twitch. This situation is widely discussed in the media and attracts the attention of the streaming platform itself. In a comment to Bloomberg, a spokesperson for Twitch said the company is closely monitoring the gambling behavior of the audience to reduce potential harm to the platform's community.
