In September 2022, the platform announced that it would prohibit live streams of certain high-profile gambling sites, including Stake.com and Roobet, which had previously been promoted on the site by the likes of Canadian rapper Drake, among others.
Clancy’s most recent comments suggested that rather than Twitch being opposed to showing gambling content altogether, the reason for the ban was that the sites in question were offshore-based operators without local licences in the jurisdictions where they operate.
“The thing that was growing was these unregulated offshore gambling sites,” Clancy said.
“And just for people that don’t understand, these are sites where there is nobody overlooking to see, for example, what are the odds on the craps tables? Do they tweak them? Do they change them? Because they’re not regulated, the team decides what they want to do.
“In general, there is no problem with streaming gambling. But we do have a problem if you’re streaming these unregulated third-party sites.”
– Twitch CEO Dan Clancy
Given the perceived lack of consumer protections at unlicensed operators, Clancy went on to suggest that he thought the promotion of the brands on Twitch was not “good for the community, so we decided to ban the unregulated.”
When still permitted, promotion of those brands was generating “a significant amount of money to a small number of creators,” he added.
Still, Clancy clarified that “in general, there is no problem with streaming gambling. But we do have a problem if you’re streaming these unregulated third-party sites.”
The only way Twitch would allow streamers to promote the prohibited brands again is “if these sites become regulated because they’re willing to adhere to the regulations of most major countries in terms of what they need to do to be a gambling site,” he added.
While regulations can vary widely from one jursidiction to the next, Clancy’s comments suggest that only operators with local licences in individual markets – which are therefore bound by regulations to offer some level of consumer protection – will be allowed on Twitch.
As for the now-banned likes of Stake and Roobet, “if their position is ‘no, we are not going to do the things that most of the major countries think is important in terms of consumer protection’, then our view is that we don’t want that on Twitch, and I don’t feel great about driving our community to VPN into those unregulated sites,” Clancy concluded.
