Twitch Announces Plans to Ban Unregulated Casino Streams
Published September 25, 2022 by Ivan P
The company has set Oct 18 as the deadline for the introduction of new policies, promising to deliver more clarity on the new rules before then.
Streaming casino games has been big on Twitch for a while, but it seems the largest streaming platform in the world is about to introduce serious changes to its policy regulating this particular area. According to the original announcement, Twitch will be banning all streams featuring unregulated online casinos.
Streamers already had to remove all gambling referral links from the platform a little over a year ago. The new change, however, could have many further-reaching consequences and influence some channels with sizeable followings.
Specifics Still to Come
The original announcement didn't offer much clarity as to what sort of a regulatory threshold the company will seek to impose and what will constitute a "regulated" casino. It did, however, promise to offer more clarity in the near future and before October 18, 2022, when the new policies will be implemented.
One thing that Twitch was very clear about, though, was that they would no longer allow the promotion of several gaming operators they singled out in their announcement. These are Roobet, Stake.com, Duelbits, and Rollbit.
These are all very popular cryptocurrency gambling sites, which suggests that crypto casinos will be the primary target of the new policy. However, these sites are all licensed by Curacao, furthering the issue of how Twitch plans to distinguish between regulated and unregulated casinos.
Future of Gambling Streams on Twitch
The initial announcement made it a point to mention that online poker and sports betting streams will not be affected by the new policy, so only casino streamers will be affected. At the same time, if the new rules will be directed against sites as a whole instead of particular games, it remains unclear if streaming-allowed activities (i.e., poker and betting) would still be allowed if conducted on one of these sites.
It will be interesting to see how Twitch also defines a regulated casino. From the initial statement, it seems clear that cryptocurrency operators do not fall in that group regardless of other factors, but the question remains what the policy will be for "traditional" sites.
International gambling operators are licensed mainly by either Malta or Curacao, but these aren't governmental organizations officially recognized by individual countries. Twitch might issue a blanket ban on all casinos not regulated by individual countries, in which case the decision would have a big impact on the casino streaming community.
With Twitch not offering any additional explanations, for the time being, we can only wait to see how things play out, but with the deadline of Oct 18 quickly approaching, we expect the company to come out with another statement providing more clarity in the very near future.
