Twitch bans gambling and affiliate links from its platform

Earlier this month, Twitch announced the ban on the promotion of online casinos and bookmakers through affiliate links and referral codes on its platform. The new rule will came into effect on the 17th of August.

• Sharing affiliate links or referral codes to sites that offer real-money slots, roulette, or dice games is now prohibited.
  
• Streamers can continue sharing content but are not allowed to publish referral codes or links.

• It is estimated that up to 6% of the 1000 top streams had gambling partnerships.

Twitch’s new restrictions can affect up to 6% of the 1000 top streamers

Twitch is the biggest streaming platform, with more than 15m daily active users. The reports show that up to 6% of the 1000 top Twitch streamers had gambling partnerships at some point in their streaming careers. 

Streamers that agreed to partnerships, get huge amounts of money from online gambling companies. Some of the streamers are warning their viewers about the dangers of gambling while also playing and promoting it. This might get the public a bit confused.

The way that online casinos can attract new players, is by giving special codes or exclusive bonuses to streamers to be advertised.

Some of the all time well-known betting streamers are:

1. Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek – Canadian player that covers Escape from Tarkov, Rust, and World of Warcraft.
2. Félix “xQcOW” Lengyel – former professional Overwatch player, before active in the Overwatch League as part of the Dallas Fuel roster.
3. Ismael “Roshtein” Swartz – a Swedish casino player with an incredible technique and more than 460k+ followers on the platform.
4. Torben “Viper” Wahl – one of the best-known Hearthstone streamers in the world.

Ismael “Roshtein” Swartz is one of his kind and has a regular income from online live gambling. Even if Twitch bans gambling, referral codes and links, he had a positive reaction. Asked about this by a viewer he said that is a great decision Twitch made. He also posted on his Twitter account that this “could be going into the right direction”.

Twitch wants to be a safe platform

Twitch announced that they will check on gambling-related content. Thus the company could still adopt more rules in the future.

To prevent harm and scams created by questionable gambling services that sponsor content on Twitch, we will prohibit sharing links and/or referral codes to sites that offer slots, roulette, or dice games. We will continue to monitor gambling-related content and update our approach as needed. To give you time to remove this content from your channel, enforcement will be delayed until August 17, 2021.

Twitch announcement

How does this influence gambling sites and online casinos?

Even if Twitch is the largest streaming platform, this decision does not affect online gambling.

Online gambling platforms have been around for some time and the viewers are already used to this type of content.

The most popular are slots and roulette but they found ways of expansion for other games. In streaming gambling, you can bet on the first blood or other things. Besides this, you can also get referral codes or affiliate bonuses as a new member.

The streamers do use referral codes on Twitch and make a lot of money off them, but they have other ways to distribute them as well. Besides that, gambling sites sponsor streamers in different ways so it is their interest to find approaches to stream. So Twitch didn’t actually do a major thing with this one. 

If Twitch bans gambling, what other options are still available?

Pretty much every other platform that already was on, starting with Youtube. If the sportsmaker, that offers the bets, holds a gambling license for the country that you live in, you don’t have to worry about the legal parts.

Will streamer betting be affected?

Streamer Betting, as the name says, is the chance to bet live on a streamer playing your favorite game.

It is popular because of the LoL, CSGO and DOTA 2 tournaments and streamers on platforms such as Twitch or Youtube.

It also has a huge variety of bets and a more mature audience that have a better understanding of Stream Betting.

As in normal betting, this one also allows you to bet on various results of the match but introduces a multitude of unique bet options depending on the game. For example, you can bet on the first kill in DOTA2.

The betting mechanism is simple and intuitive but there are some rules that you might want to know first.