This post accurately mentions the events of the last week but doesn't really capture the full scope of what's going on with Twitch and the gravity of the situation.

On the streaming front, Twitch has made a number of changes in the past few months. Typically Twitch Partners had to exclusively live stream on Twitch. They've relaxed these restrictions to really soften the blow for what's coming. A big change (just announced today) is that subscription splits to 50-50 in almost all cases. A lot of mostly bigger streamers were grandfatheered into better deals (ie 70-30).

If you don't follow Twitch, the $5/month subscription (and Twitch Prime that came later for Amazon Prime members) really did create a way for smaller creators to be able to survive where they otherwise couldn't on ad or sponsorship revenue alone.

But Twitch has been trying to move away from subs because advertising scales so much better for Twitch. The general guideline for ad density now is 3 minutes per hour and you could get 6 ads of pre-roll on joining a livestream. It's kind of crazy how much they're pushing it. This really gives the impression that Twitch is desperate for revenue now they're owned by Amazon. In today's announcement about the sub split changes they basically said 200 hours/month of live streaming costs them $1000/month. That might well be the retail cost on EC2 but it's nowhere near the true cost (which is much less).

Now in the last 2 years or so, gambling has really started to dominate the platform. This is quite literally people playing slots on auto-roll for hours every day, sometimes for $1500/spin where each spin may well be 6 seconds. This has been driven by largely unregulated crypto casinos like stake.com. I say "largely unregulated" because stake.com for example is registered in Curacao.

The likes of xqc and Trainwrecks (2 of the biggest streamers on the platform) were getting paid in excesss of $1 million/month each to play slots on stake.com. That's how big this is.

Twitch announced yesterday that most pure luck gambling (eg slots, dice) that weren't registered and legal in the US (because of greater regulation) would be banned from the platform.

It's hard to say why the timing of this is now. Some speculate this is because of the streamer ItsSliker being exposed for scamming $300k+ from other streamers and even viewers over 1-2 years to fund a sports betting addiction (note: the Twitch ban doesn't apply to sports betting).

Gambling has been controversial on Twitch and this blew up with the Sliker drama, which led to an entirely separate issue being raised: the alleged cover-up of a sexual assault of one streamer by another. This event was allegedly covered up by a big streamer (Mizkif) who is a member of a large organization called OTK. It was announced there'd be an independent investigation of this and he was suspended from the org yesterday.

These are of course serious allegations and should be treated as such and they may well have criminal consequences. It's worth noting that the cover-up accusations came from Trainwrecks after a fresh round of gambling criticism (including by Mizkif) in the wake of the Sliker scamming drama. The victim has since spoken out on the issue and said Train made that public accusation with her blessing and support.

All of this has really rocked the Twitch world and, if anything, should just show you how much money there is in gambling, how damaging it is and how much it corrupts.