In August 2023, the Counter-Strike community rejoiced as Twitch updated their terms of service to explicitly prohibit CS:GO case opening sites and gambling being promoted on the platform. Despite this ban though, nothing has changed, with no streamers banned for this content.
After increased scrutiny about the prevalence of CS:GO (now CS2) gambling sites being promoted to viewers on Twitch and YouTube, the Amazon-owned platform updated their rules to explicitly prohibit such promotion.
The change was met with widespread praise from the CS community, and was expected to impact countless streamers who had deals with gambling sites, with affiliate codes and sponsored segments during their streams.
Twitch just banned CSGO skin gambling sponsorships pic.twitter.com/uAD81F3jBs
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) August 2, 2023
However, that was over four months ago, and in the time since, Dexerto has not identified a single channel banned for promoting CS gambling sites, despite it still being commonplace on Twitch.
Both individual Counter-Strike streamers as well as tournament organizers continue to promote case-opening sites, stream themselves gambling on the sites, and some even use Twitch extensions such as Magic Wheel, to win prizes.
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Prior to the ban, YouTuber HOUNGOUNGAGNE found that around 75% of the top 300 CS:GO streamers on Twitch featured some form of gambling sponsorship. Despite the explicit ban, it appears this figure is unchanged.
At the time, Twitch told Dexerto, “There’s been renewed interest in CSGO gambling broadly, so we’ve added clarifying language to our FAQ to make clear that promotion/sponsorship is not allowed on our service.”
We have reached out to Twitch since about the lack of enforcement of this rule, but at the time of writing have not received a response.
For now, it appears that Twitch is permitting the promotion of Counter-Strike skins gambling, despite their FAQ stating otherwise.