Twitch has updated its Community Guidelines to explicitly prohibit the promotion and sponsorship of CS:GO skin gambling sites. The live-streaming platform has slowly updated and reevaluated its stance on gambling and it began cracking down on the practice late last year. So, why have Twitch staff decided to ban CS:GO skin gambling now and what’s the viewership share of broadcasts of case openings & advertisements of skin gambling sites?
Twitch’s gambling history
Gambling within the live-streaming content creation sphere has been a consistently divisive issue for streamers and creators. Although Twitch only began to crack down on gambling within the last couple of years, this is not when the issue of gambling in the live-streaming sphere was first discussed.
In 2016, YouTube creators TmarTn and Syndicate were advertising a CS:GO skin gambling site and encouraging both fans and other content creators to play on a site they had come across. YouTube videos of their gambling antics were sensationally titled as a quick and easy way to earn money. Eventually, the truth came out that both TmarTn and Syndicate were part-owners of the site in question, and had failed to disclose their interest within the company.
Since then, gambling has evolved in content creation. Instead of people promoting a particular site through an edited YouTube video, Twitch creators began to stream themselves live on various gambling sites. Streamers like xQc and Trainwreckstv began streaming themselves on a particular gambling website, betting large amounts of money and occasionally winning big. Of course, they were directly sponsored by the site in question and sometimes weren’t even gambling their own money away, but sponsored credit given to them by the site.
Gambling and slots quickly became one of the most-watched categories on Twitch. Between January and September of 2022, the Slots category on Twitch received 308M+ Hours Watched, enough to rank it within the top 10 categories on the platform per watch time. It was also the only category within the top ten to have less than 1K Peak Channels and it boasted the highest average Viewers per Channel: 1043. Slots was not only one of the biggest categories on Twitch, it was directly supported by some of the biggest channels on the platform.
Twitch’s complicated relationship with gambling reached a boiling point when it was revealed that Twitch streamer Sliker had scammed fans and creators out of at least $200,000 USD. Sliker eventually revealed that he needed the money to fund his CS:GO gambling addiction, although he would gamble on the outcome of esports matches instead of slot machines. Shortly after this scandal, Twitch announced they would prohibit streamers from broadcasting themselves on gambling sites which are not licensed in the US or which do not have sufficient consumer protection practices in place.
After Twitch announced this change, Trainwreckstv decided to tell his community the details of his gambling sponsorships. Across 16 months of gambling on Twitch, Trainwreckstv was paid $360M USD since the beginning of his contract up until Twitch’s ban. XQc famously revealed in August of 2022 that he had wagered over $685M+ USD on one particular site. Now, this figure doesn’t mean he has spent that much money on the site. Rather the figure represents the total amount of money gambled by him: whether that comes from his own account or a sponsorship condition is unclear. Nevertheless, the figure is mind-boggling.
After the ban, many streamers moved to other platforms which would allow them to continue gambling, whereas other streamers found a new kind of gambling to promote.
Transition to CS:GO gambling
CS:GO skins and gambling within the game have been a topic for discussion since the release of cases. Within the EU, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Slovakia have already reached the conclusion that loot boxes qualify as gambling and they have been restricted for citizens of these countries. However, when Twitch attempted to ban gambling which is unregulated and unlicensed, they overlooked the possibility of CS:GO skin gambling.
Skin gambling has been a successful content creation topic on both YouTube and Twitch for a long time. Not only the in-game loot boxes but also creators receiving sponsorships from third-party sites which enable gambling through the use of CS:GO skins. As video game skins and items are not as well regulated as traditional FIAT currency, this allows websites to operate in a grey area of legality.
Both large streamers and smaller dedicated Counter-Strike creators have engaged in skin gambling. German streamer ohnePixel hosted a case opening last month live on Twitch. The German creator titled his stream “$100K CSGO CASE OPENING [WORLD RECORD]” and it was his most popular stream ever. He received 522K hours of watch time during just 6 hours of broadcasting time, and he set a personal record for peak concurrent viewers at 236K PV. ohnePixel received the loot boxes for the record-breaking stream directly from a viewer, who sent him a trade offer for all of the cases.
ohnePixel receiving the trade offer for almost €120,000K worth of CS:GO loot boxes
Streamers Trainwreckstv and xQc continued to use CS:GO case openings as a way to gamble on Twitch. xQc will often open some CS:GO cases on stream in between his YouTube and Chess content and Trainwreckstv has exclusively opened CS:GO cases on Twitch since April. Trainwrecktv’s CS:GO loot box streams have become his most successful Twitch streams since the gambling crackdown last October, which is also affected by his move to the streaming platform Kick.
YouTube creator HOUNGOUNGAGNE recently uploaded a video where he claims of the top 300 most-watched CS:GO streamers on Twitch, 75%+ of them have a CS:GO skin gambling sponsorship. Even professional esports teams are getting involved: G2 Esports announced earlier this year they would sign a partnership with a gambling website that uses CS:GO skins as a currency. Here at Streams Charts, we decided to take a look at our own data regarding the prevalence of CS:GO gambling and case opening.
To analyse the prevalence of CS:GO gambling & case openings, we took the total watch time for CS:GO streams throughout July 2023 and analysed which of these streams were covering CS:GO case openings or directly promoted skin gambling sites in the titles of streams. Of the total watch time accumulated for CS:GO in July, such streams were accountable for 6.2% of the Twitch category’s watch time, which totalled 58.3M hours.
6.2% is already a significant percentage of the total watch time, but this watch time also came from only 2.3K channels, compared to the 133.1K unique channels that streamed CS:GO during July. July wasn’t a quiet month for CS:GO either: hype is still high for the CS2 release this Summer and the BLAST Premier Fall 2023 and the Play-In & Group Stage of the IEM Cologne 2023 events took place during July.
During our data analysis for this topic, we also came across another interesting fact. Of all CS:GO streamers on Twitch during July who received 100+ viewers on average, 2.55% of these had direct links to CS:GO skin gambling sites in their channel description.
Does this mean Twitch is officially banning opening cases live on stream, even though this brings in a huge portion of their watch time for CS:GO? Not exactly.
Twitch’s ban on skin gambling
On the 2nd of August 2023, Twitch updated their community guidelines to prohibit the promotion or sponsorship of skins gambling. This means streamers who are sponsored by these CS:GO skin gambling websites will have to cut ties with their sponsor. Critically, the guidelines also would prohibit G2 Esports from showcasing their partnership with a skin gambling site, whose logo features on the G2 Esports official jersey. This may affect tournament broadcast channels if G2 Esports do not update their jersey.
Twitch’s decision to ban CS:GO skin gambling is another step for the platform to get gambling under control on their site. Earlier this year Valve also announced that gambling using CS:GO skins (or skins from other games) is now in direct breach of Steam’s code of conduct. Valve and Twitch both understand that gambling through CS:GO skins is an unregulated and wild industry that they can no longer support by not clamping down on this practice sooner.
YouTuber HOUNGOUNGAGNE is credited with recently bringing attention to this issue, and he was interviewed by Jake Lucky on Twitter about his thoughts on the policy update from Twitch. Although the YouTuber is happy to see Twitch taking steps against the skins gambling industry, he remains sceptical if this community guidelines update will be effectively enforced.
Although banning the promotion of third-party skin gambling sites will affect streamers with sponsorships and other organisations, who does it not affect? Well, the wording of the guidelines is quite vague and Twitch is yet to elaborate on exactly what is and isn’t in breach of the guidelines. However, it seems that there is nothing stopping streamers from streaming themselves gambling on these sites, so long as they are not directly promoted or sponsored by the site. There is also nothing in the guidelines about opening CS:GO loot boxes directly in the game, so streamers like xQc, Trainwreckstv, and OhnePixel are free to continue opening thousands of CS:GO cases.
Ultimately, CS:GO loot boxes and skins are a legal grey area that skin gambling sites have used to circumvent regulation and attention. If the games use virtual items instead of real currency, is it even gambling? Twitch and Valve have seemed to reach the decision that yes, it is gambling and it is unregulated. Twitch’s decision to stop streamers from promoting these sites is a step in the right direction to get gambling under control on Twitch, but gambling on the platform is multi-faceted and will not disappear overnight.
