Influencer-led gambling in gaming on Twitch, Kick and YouTube

In recent years, there has been a rapidity of gaming and gambling combinations most commonly noticed in Twitch, YouTube and Kick streaming platforms. Influencers, with their considerable and active follower base, play a crucial role in transforming the landscape of gambling-related content in the gaming community. However, this landscape has also witnessed a concerning trend of having influential and dishonest actors (individuals and companies) adapt to gambling, which adds to the loopholes within the game. Influencer-driven betting within game content is a tendency that has arisen on the radar of researchers, government and campaign organisations, respectively. With this type of marketing, influencers display casino games or betting content (often on unregulated or overseas gambling sites) and participate in gambling activities in real-time themselves during live streams. What is significant here is that it gains popularity mainly among young or vulnerable people who can be passionate and emulative of others. The ongoing integration of gambling into game content brought up by charismatic influencers and state-of-the-art streaming technologies gets to be a grey area in gaming, drawing parallels between the two as forms of entertainment. This literature review discusses how the features of incentivised gaming in terms of behaviour, environment, and technology are influencer-provided gambling over streaming channels.

This report highlights several themes of work. However, taking a consumer risk-based approach and to achieve measurable and timely social impact, ESG Gaming commits explicitly to the following activities during 2024/25, and we invite others to work alongside us:

1. Conduct research involving key stakeholders to discuss, shape, scope, and co-create educational and awareness content for streaming platforms and the esports sector.
   To be completed by December 2024.
   
   
2. Pilot with up to 10,000 beneficences and academically evaluate educational content and audience fit.
   To be completed by April 2025.
   
   
3. Undertake substantive research on Black Market Gambling to understand exactly what it is and how it operates.
   To be completed by September 2024
   
   
4. Undertake substantive research and a literature review on Choice Architecture on Websites to understand the relationship between consumer choice and behaviour.
   To be completed by September 2024
   
   
5. Lead an education symposium with principal stakeholders to share findings from (i) the two new research projects and (ii) findings from the educational content and external evaluation.
   To be completed by July 2025.

We have provided the report in two versions for you to review. Version one is a single page view, and version two is a double-page view:

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