Twitch CEO Weighs In on Gambling on Stream and Offshore Sites
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The rowdy streamers’ professed love for streaming slots has extended beyond Twitch, as the platform and its chief executive officer, Dan Clancy, have taken a much harder look at what gambling content must be allowed onto the Amazon-owned giant.
Twitch has been muddling through reform for gambling content, introducing a dedicated policy that has people stream in the Slots category, one of the highest-grossing and most watched on the platform, but the company also pressed on with another measure – its decision to suspend streams that promote specific gambling websites.
Essentially, brands such as Stake.com and Rollbit.com are no longer allowed to be streamed, which has prompted the former to take matters into its own hands and introduce a dedicated streaming platform, Kick, which has been gaining followers and viewers exponentially.
This comes at a time when Clancy is doubling down on his decision, and the company’s guidance and direction, that in order to have a casino website streamed on Twitch, it must have been regulated by a government agency.
He specifically seems to suggest an agency based in the United States and has criticized offshore gambling sites, that is sites that do not have a license to operate in the country. Clancy spoke during an interview with Filian, a VTube streamer, and said:
The thing that was growing was these unregulated offshore gambling sites. These are sites that there’s nobody overlooking to see, for example, what are the odds on the craps tables, are they tweaking them, do they change them, cause they’re not regulated.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy
He further explained that there were significant amounts of money being forwarded towards those gambling sites, originating from Twitch, which the executive said was not something the platform thought was good for its communities. Clancy, though, argues that streaming gambling as a concept is perfectly reasonable and that Twitch has no strong aversion to the institution of gambling as long as it’s done correctly.
However, Clancy is also somewhat vague in what websites that are now deemed to be not a good fit to be shown on Twitch streams would have to do in order to qualify. He argues that should those sites become regulated, and “are willing to adhere to the regulations of most major countries,” they would be acceptable on the platform.
Then again, this doesn’t really introduce clarity in the debate as the United States, for example, does not care if a website is regulated in the United Kingdom. In fact, every individual state may press a claim against sites that target their own citizens without a license.
