Slots on Twitch: the dirty truth

Twitch is being tarnished by some of the platform’s biggest stars and the power of greed and gambling. 

Twitch is one of the most important things to happen in games. Alongside the rise of esports, the proliferation of the battle royale genre, and the invention of the smartphone, it has had a huge impact (and arguably contributed to two out of those three). It’s made careers, brought games to the fore, raised millions upon millions of dollars for charity, saved lives, raised awareness, the list goes on. All that is now being tarnished by some of the platform’s biggest stars and the power of greed and gambling. 

The Slots category is filled with gambling. Not the skill-based card games of the Poker category, or even the halfway-house of the stock market, and a million miles from the likes of Hearthstone, StarCraft, Counter-Strike, even FIFA Ultimate Team and the other games that built the platform. Pure gambling — slot machines, pachinko, wheels of fortune.

The Slots category on an average day.

It’s not new. Eurogamer reported back in 2018 on how front-and-center this category was and the implications for the platform’s younger audience. It’s been festering along since then, but its growth rate accelerated quickly during the pandemic, much of it tied to the rise of crypto-currency and its gambling-adjacent investment model.

The two are now inexorably tied, in case there’s any doubt. The biggest Slots streamers have live tracking of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices in the corner of their streams. Stake, the website on which the majority of Slots ‘gameplay’ takes place, deals almost exclusively in crypto, depending on legalities in the countries where it operates. In the U.K., for example, they have to operate in real currency.

Stake, it turns out, is the rotten core of this entire situation. With the near-infinite cashflow it has from being the primary betting platform for gamblers worldwide, Stake has spent millions upon millions of dollars getting Twitch streamers to promote its website. Through 2020 and 2021, streamers would be promoting Stake through VPNs and making money for sign-ups even in countries where it wasn’t legal. Stake also has sponsorship deals with many folks outside of the streaming world, from sports teams to racing drivers to Drake.

The average rates companies pay Twitch streamers is one of the industry’s dirty little secrets, one that everybody involved would rather you not think or know about. When promoting a game, a publisher easily will pay upwards of $20,000 an hour for even mid-sized streamers, often much, much more (we’ve seen figures as high as $35k quoted, and none of this was for the platform’s biggest players). Remember that is per hour. This money is in addition to the ‘natural’ revenue they receive from ads, subscribers, donations, non-game sponsorships (hardware, software, VPNs, clothes, chairs, the list is endless) and much more.

What you have here is young millionaires, many untrained in anything regarding ethics, public relations, or seemingly common decency, as we’ll see. The 1% of the gaming world, and the biggest likely part of the 1% of the whole population. They have rabid fanbases who rely on them for everything from game recommendations to fashion and eating habits to parasocial emotional support. They have agencies and teams of people, all taking their cut, handling their lives so they can spend more time entertaining those people.

What right-minded casino-runner, operating out of whatever corner of the world they can get a gambling license in, wouldn’t be sprinting as fast as possible to get them on the hook? A skilled gambling promotor is going to have money to burn that would make the likes of Microsoft and Sony influencer managers wince. You might need to pay a premium to get them playing something so far from their usual haunts, but that’s business.

Slots streamers will often have multiple games running at once.

Plus, it’s an investment. Very impressionable audiences watch millions of hours of Twitch every month. What do you care if it’s not legal in their country? There’s a VPN advertisement right next to yours on the stream page. What do you care how young they might be? Slap some warning signs up and don’t even check in the registration process to see if they’re coming from a real place. What do you care about gambling addiction — everyone makes their own choices, right?

Just to be clear about the types of games we’re talking about, there’s a reason the category is called Slots. As well as the titular games, there’s also digital pachinko, which doesn’t even have the fun of watching balls actually fall down. A game that was being promoted by all the Stake-backed streamers during the production of this article was Limbo, a literal high-low guessing game with some complexities mixed in to obfuscate its pointlessness.

There are also live-dealer games, though they play themselves slightly less and are generally slower. This is where overlays and cameras in a distant studio combine to give the same feeling of playing a live game, complete with sexy hosts and a real wheel. It’s a hell of a trip — here’s a completely random one I found while researching. And here’s a quote from Wikipedia about the company that made it:

“On May 29, 2020, Playtech agreed to pay £3.5 million to responsible gambling charities following the suicide of 25-year-old Chris Bruney, a customer at the company’s TitanBet and Winner gambling sites who lost over £119,000 in the five days prior to his death, during which time he was issued multiple bonuses by managers of the sites’ VIP programs. The UK Gambling Commission had planned to impose a £3.5 million penalty on Playtech subsidiary PT Entertainment Services after identifying ‘serious systemic failings in the way PTES managed its social responsibility and anti-money laundering processes’ but the company surrendered its UK licenses before the penalty could be imposed. Following media reports of the controversy, Playtech agreed to pay the £3.5 million and chairperson Claire Milne promised to personally apologize to Bruney’s family.”

Playtech’s range of services.

There’s also regular casino live games you might expect. Here’s a clip of one of the largest slots streamers playing roulette in which everyone involved looks like there’s nothing behind the eyes any more. All available on Stake dot com.

This is a good time to bring in the other half of the equation, the streamers themselves. That’s Trainwreckstv (real name Tyler Faraz Niknam, also known as Trainwreck) in the above stream, one of the biggest dedicated Slots players on the platform. He started streaming in the mid-2010s, coming to some sort of recognition in November 2017 when he called women on Twitch a sexist slur for taking his viewership. He was banned for five days, but you can see the meteoric rise in his follower count before, during, and after that incident.

At the time, Nikham’s streaming time was spent on a variety of games popular on the platform — World of Warcraft, PUBG, Fortnite. Through 2018 to 2020 he transitioned to a majoritively Just Chatting channel, hosting a podcast, while still playing popular games as they came around. Naturally, he was also banned again for sexist comments at one point, supposedly indefinitely, but returned within a month.

2020 brought the pandemic and the rise of social deduction game Among Us to Twitch. Nikham became one of that game’s most popular streamers, winning a tournament for it. At this point he’s a known name in variety streaming, various esports streams, plenty of games with wide audiences across age ranges and other demographics.

Nikham did his first Slots stream in April 2021, taking 7,433 viewers from Just Chatting into the category. The archive of the stream is lost to time and there don’t seem to be any tweets about it on his official account, but it’s extremely likely it was sponsored. Since then, he has streamed more than 2,700 hours of Slots, 1,325 in January to May this year alone — not counting any time he was streaming and wasn’t properly tagged, or off-stream gambling time. Of the 3,650 hours that exist in that five-month period, he spent 36 percent of that time gambling.

Forget the potential to drag an audience who rely on him (and which he has built through ‘inspiring’ speeches targeting young people who feel estranged) into gambling, forget the bans for sexism, the crypto-scam adjacency, forget how many people watching may be underage or impressionable, and that he admits he was the “gateway” for the Slots section to “real Twitch.” This is a picture of a self-described “degenerate” gambling addict.

Here he is talking about an $11 million swing in one stream. Here’s an almost complete lack of reaction to winning over a million dollars, a “little juicer.” Here’s his reaction to finding out his gambling streams might have consequences (Apex Legends appears to be a normal part of his streaming rotation now).

If this tweet is to be believed, he lost $200 million of winnings in only four sessions. (All the while, his streams have a big red banner telling viewers not to gamble.) 

Nikham spends his money in some pretty wild ways. There are the cars, the new house in Canada, furniture, tech items, and the like. But he’s also given away $10 million to his community, including mental healthcare access. He speaks out on the right side of a lot of issues, like gun control, vaccine/masking mandates, and the invasion of Ukraine. Here he is just weeks ago giving away more than $100k on a whim. He’s seen as one of the most generous people on Twitch, because he’s just that rich. The money he’s gambling, losing, and giving away? It doesn’t matter to him.

There are many dedicated Slots streamers like him, though they play at lower stakes. ClassyBeef are a group of people operating one channel, with their own website highlighting all their biggest wins and unique deals they can give you, so long as you sign up to sites with their codes. They also run a StreamElements store where you can spend channel loyalty points, earned through watching and subscribing, for various things. This includes gambling itself, buying tokens to potentially win items. You see how the routes to gambling come from every angle, all sponsored by Stake.com?

A standard stream elements store.

Obviously they’re not unique. Here’s another StreamElements store that literally does giveaways for Bitcoin – why be the gateway to just one pyramid scheme? – organized by DeuceAce, another Slots streamer. 

Roshtein is one of the bigger streamers in Slots and on the whole of Twitch. He has some of the most-viewed clips on the platform, as he pops off about wins as high at $16 million in a single spin. There’s also endless debate as to how much of the money he’s playing with is real, with even Nikham going after him on more than one occasion. This is to do with deals brokered between the sites and streamers where some percentage of the money being played with is the casino’s, or is added on top of any amount the streamer deposits. Naturally, and as Nikham points out, not being transparent about that is abhorrent.

The list is never-ending — streamers with thousands of concurrent viewers spending two to 20 hours a day gambling away. Minimal disclosure of what they’re being paid by who to do so, mostly unregulated, and completely allowed by Twitch. Hell, it’s true across everyone on their platform, but it’s slightly more dangerous to have undisclosed gambling adverts than poorly explained marketing deals to play three hours of the new Call of Duty.

Adin Ross and xQc are the reason why. Ross was a 2K NBA streamer whose rise came from a social media campaign centered around the poor state of 2K21. His channel grew from a few hundred concurrents at the start of 2020 to tens of thousands because of that campaign, his friendship with Bronny James, and his popularization of streamed e-dating. 

In 2021, he was sponsored to stream gambling. He often had six-figure concurrents and growing fame from a number of bans, stunts, giveaways, and generally being a likable young man — just 21 at time of writing, 20 when he first streamed Slots. Less than the legal age to enter most casinos in the United States, by the way.

His audience was quite literally too young to gamble, being vastly his age or under. Here he is failing to defend the practice in an interview last year, where he also says he expects his audience is as young as 13. Same interview, saying he expects those kids spend their parents’ money based on what he does. Here’s a stream from last month of him doing it, again sponsored by Stake. Here’s a Twitch clip of him admitting to doing sponsored crypto investment content and hoping nobody bought it, plus tweets from him saying he’d never done any crypto. Here’s another streamer claiming that he spoke to an 11-year-old fan of Ross who had, obviously, gambled, along with all his friends, because he’d seen Ross do it on stream.

xQc (Félix Lengyel) is the same story, only worse. A streamer who’s been in hot water for homophobic and racist remarks during his time in the Overwatch League, the controversy from that has naturally lead to him being Twitch’s biggest star. Literally the most watched streamer on the entire platform, and thus the planet, for multiple months and years in a row. He has, of course, been banned multiple times.

Lengyel’s popularity is such that he could likely claim some responsibility for the massive boom in interest in chess, alongside Netflix’s Queen’s Gambit, after starting to stream it in 2020. He has access to every game under the sun, all the money he could possibly need, an audience of hundreds of thousands of concurrents and over 10 million followers, and is arguably the most powerful voice in games. If xQc plays your game, the number of eyeballs on it alone, and the knock-on effect if his audience shows interest to other streamers playing it, is worth thousand upon thousands of dollars.

You’re a smart reader; you know where this is going. What’s particularly spectacular about Lengyel is he’s done it twice. After getting slaughtered online by everyone from other creators to randoms (hello) to his own community for doing gambling streams, he went back to it in the past couple of months. He doesn’t see the problem with unregulated sign-ups. He doesn’t get how people were predicting it.

I found this all pretty shocking to research. Twitch is a lot of things, from cringe-comedy ‘Just Chatting’ streams, or the ‘how low can we go’ borderline-R18 streams, the bullying and harassment streams, even the actions of the audience when they send SWAT teams or worse after streamers. Maybe you hate it more when the politics of a nation in 2020 or the trauma of a couple in 2022 were turned into live-streamed entertainment. I don’t see how anyone could be proud of it. I don’t see how anyone at Twitch can be happy with it, no matter how much money it makes.

As one other streamer put it, referring to xQc but applicable to the whole sorry situation: They’re “gifted the opportunity to make tens of millions a year, still would happily sell the entire viewerbase down the river for a little bit more.”

Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.