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After Twitch found itself at the epicenter of a gambling scandal, the streaming giant has since doubled down on its prohibition of gambling anywhere on its platform, but the decision could be too little, too late. Despite other companies taking more of a hard line stance against gambling to protect their users, Twitch has allowed a gray area to take hold on with a history of gambling scandals from streamers getting sponsored by online casinos to the obscure legality over crypto usage. As a result, while competitors like YouTube cracked down on such content, Twitch remained a haven for it.

But with Twitch‘s gambling ban now in effect, the platform’s delayed response to the issue at large has meant that a sizable community has developed and grown in this gray area. So not only has the damage already been done to Twitch’s users that have allowed them to develop gambling addictions over time, but this inaction has resulted in echo chambers forming around gambling communities that will only make it harder for them to break these addictions. Twitch’s ban can’t break these communities up, and instead will push them to a new platform where the cycle will just repeat.

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Twitch Has A Gambling Problem

Even before the revelations broke about one of Twitch’s bigger content creators ItsSliker defrauding his fellow creators and friends out of money to fuel his gambling addiction, the platform had already come under fire for its permissiveness towards gambling content. In fact, Twitch’s apparent disinclination for getting too involved or restrictive on such content led to a petition calling for Twitch to ban gambling content on its platform. But with some of its biggest creators having embraced gambling over the years, including those like xQc and Adin Ross, the gambling community has found fertile ground on Twitch.

This community has become so entrenched that after Twitch announced it would be tightening its policies on gambling content there were outspoken critics of the move, even in spite of the praise Twitch received from popular streamers like Asmongold or Pokimane. For example, Corinna Kopf has criticized Twitch suggesting that the ban is a slippery slope and instead problematically argued that users are “too soft” to prevent themselves from becoming addicted. Kopf and others like her indicate that Twitch won’t be able to wishfully ban gambling and that be the end of the issue.

Twitch’s Gambling Ban Might Not Be Enough

If these pro-gambling communities aren’t prepared to leave Twitch even with this ban in place, there are ways they could test the new policies in ways that Twitch appears to have either not accounted for or left loopholes specifically to avoid having too hard a position on. To clarify, Twitch will be banning slots, roulette, and dice game sites, but fails to address areas like sports betting or poker sites. This means that streamers could still use other sites that dodge the ban to continue to indulge theirs and their fans gambling addictions, especially when creators like Trainwreckstv boast about making $360 million through gambling.

Additionally, trying to pin down the specific legality of gambling both in terms of gaming content and live streams will present a further challenge to Twitch as it catches up with the rest of the industry’s anti-gambling stance. Already having faced controversies over crypto gambling on its platform, Twitch could eventually be forced to tackle the issue of microtransactions, loot boxes, and pay-to-win games, especially when streamer Shroud claimed players should get over Lost Ark’s pay-to-win controversy. As countries begin to regulate these areas, Twitch’s current ban might not be sufficient.

Lastly, even supposing Twitch could completely shut down gambling on its platform, the pro-gambling community it has allowed to congregate aren’t likely to just disperse. The likelier outcome is that either they will find or create somewhere new to migrate to, meaning Twitch’s ban has less solved the issue and more made it somebody else’s problem. But while Twitch isn’t responsible for the actions of others away from the site, many believe it shoulders some blame for enabling these groups for too long without a ban, so much so that they have become unbreakable and pervasive and will only continue to make others fall victim to gambling addictions.

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