How gaming elites exploit gamblers
Both videogame developers and streamers encourage players to gamble away millions of dollars
The twin evils of the videogame industry – streaming service Twitch and game publisher Activision Blizzard – have reached new lows, crossing the threshold of user exploitation with the promotion of gambling.
Not content with raking in millions of dollars a day from the sales of their products, or in the case of Twitch, through advertising to its streaming audience, these companies are now profiting from real-world addiction, and they’re doing so by normalizing gambling as a healthy activity.
One of Twitch’s biggest streamers, Quebec-based Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel – whose claim to fame came from professionally streaming the Activision Blizzard game ‘Overwatch’ – has recently come under fire for hosting sponsored streams for online casinos.
In a recent stream, Lengyel boasted that over $119 million had been wagered through his referral links to an online casino, used exclusively by members of his audience. His remarks attracted condemnation from fellow streamer Hasan Piker, who pointed out that the losses incurred by his viewers quite possibly resulted in him earning more income from the sponsorship.
“A lot of these websites, Stake and all of them, if they have a code, if you are offering a code, that means that Stake is tracking all of your losses, and you are getting a percentage of your fanbase’s losses,” Piker said on stream. “That is quite literally the truth. That is how fing bad it is. They let you in on it, dude. They let you in on the losses of your fing fanbase.”
Gambling streams by xQc are so popular that a single six-hour stream has been estimated to have been viewed by approximately 98,500 people who spent a collective 550,000 hours watching.
What’s worse is that the streamer even admitted that a lot of the time, streamers who promote online casinos don’t even spend any of their own money to gamble. In other words, they have no skin in the game – they’re just there to promote the life-destroying activity to their hapless viewers.
Gambling has become so popular on Twitch that the platform has even created a dedicated section to promote the activity – alongside its most popular video games like ‘Overwatch’, ‘Hearthstone’, and the newly launched ‘Diablo Immortal’, all of which are made by Activision Blizzard.
But how are gambling and video games connected? For starters, some of Activision Blizzard’s most popular video games all contain a gambling component, requiring their players to spend real money to be competitive. While the gambling in ‘Overwatch’, which comes in the form of “loot crates,” offers purely cosmetic upgrades, the same can’t be said of ‘Hearthstone’ and ‘Diablo Immortal’.
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/556824-twitch-blizzard-gambling-diablo/