Twitch star Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel defended his sponsored gambling stream after coming under fire from members of his community for hosting one.
While Twitch is mostly home to gamers showing off their skills in different titles, the ‘Just Chatting’ and Gambling sections are pretty huge as well. In terms of the layer, viewers always want to see a streamer win big after getting down bad.
Sometimes, the two crossover and you’ll have streamers, like xQc, who typically play games venturing into gambling as well.
Many of these streams are sponsored by newer gambling sites, so getting a huge streamer like xQc playing their games brings plenty of eyes to it. Though, it also brings plenty of controversy as well, with the Canadian having to defend himself and other streamers.
During his April 22 stream, xQc spent an hour or so gambling some cash on a website that has sponsored a few streamers. At that point, he wasn’t sponsored, but on April 24, he returned with a sponsored stream. Some viewers called him out for hopping on the sponsored ‘bandwagon’, given he has such a huge audience and promoting them.
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“I’m super open and transparent about everything, when we did the gamba s**t the other day, people were fine, it was a lot of good content and it was fun, and when we swapped games it was insane hatred, even though everybody in Texas, around me, all did #AD streams that they took the ‘shameless’ deals or whatever, right,” xQc said, defending himself.
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He noted that the sponsorship he had was similar to the one streamers like Trainwrecks have where they don’t have to really promote anything, but alert viewers to the fact that it’s an ad. “So if I’m going to get s**t on, hardcore, for something I didn’t do, whatever dude. It’s like dude, it’s just weird. I get crazy hate for not doing something, when the ones that did shameless s**t got no hate for it, it’s just weird,” xQc added.
Afterwards, some fans pointed out that he’s gone off on other streamers before for promoting gambling heavily, but xQc’s main issue there was that they were doing so without the #AD or 18+ disclosure.
Seeing the former Overwatch pro run a sponsored stream is pretty rare anyway, so it remains to be seen if he’ll run any further promoted streams in the near future for anything similar.
