xQc deal nothing more than a sensationalised gambling sponsorship
Even for the esports industry, the commentary around the xQc x Kick deal has been obscene.
Afternoon all,
It’s been a little while as life’s been a little hectic, but let’s get back into it - there’s plenty to talk about as always…
A spot of housekeeping first, and I’m delighted to announce that “Esprouts” is now being published under the +More Media umbrella.
It shall sit alongside other fantastic gambling and esports industry newsletters, including:
Nothing will change from your end, unless you wish to get involved from a sponsorship perspective, in which case reach out to scott@andmore.media
Making all the headlines this week has been Félix “xQc” Lengyel’s HISTORY MAKING, INDUSTRY DISRUPTING, FUTURE DEFINING two year non-exclusive deal with streaming platform Kick worth up to $100 million.
Esports (and broader, influencer) coverage is extremely proficient at being sensationalist. If you were a reader of esports coverage approximately 21 days ago, the entire industry was dead.
‘Esports winter’ had swallowed all venture capital funding, and everyone thought that any investment in esports was completely pointless.
The brightest brains hunkered down and proceeded to dust off the golden ‘media rights and PPV’ ticket as the solution. Rest in Peace esports: the collective blame was half of on the consumer for ‘rejecting PPV’ and half on tournament organisers and publishers for not selling media rights and charging spectators for the end product. Not sure we ever got to the bottom of how that would fix unsustainable wage to turnover ratio, challenging macro conditions and the systemic intellectual property issues that plague it.
x-Q-bloody-c
I’ve had a brief hiatus so needed to vent slightly about the above, but now let’s move onto the fantastic role model Félix “xQc” Lengyel. xQc’s esports achievements include multiple suspensions from the Overwatch League plus eventual removal from the Dallas Fuel roster for his antics.
In leaving behind professional Overwatch League, he capitalised on his profile and continued to grow to usurp the likes of Ninja and Shroud by late 2020 and become the most watched Twitch streamer.
What’s the deal?
He has now signed a deal of $70 million over two years, rising to $100 million with incentives to stream on ‘industry disruptor Kick’. The deal is non-exclusive, although Twitch will not allow partners to stream on another platform concurrently with Twitch (hence Ninja was recently on YouTube & Kick).
I would suggest that, barring pushback from game publishers (etc), he will use Twitch for gaming content and then Kick for gambling streams, plus chatting with some of his unhinged friends who have the potential to spew utter bile given Kick’s existing reputation for poor moderation. xQc already streamed well over an hour of The Dark Knight live on stream before Kick realised they were in breach of every DMCA law and forced him to stop.
What is Kick?
There’s no secret that Kick (owned by Stake.com) was effectively born out of Twitch’s clamp down on gambling streaming. The adjustments to Twitch terms of service with regards to gambling effectively made the streaming of sites licensed in Curacao against ToS. As a result, Stake.com’s blossoming affiliate model and influencer-led advertising model ceased to be viable.
After H122, over 240 million hours of gambling content had been consumed on Twitch, more than the entire of 2020 - owing largely due to the growth of Curacao-licensed crypto casinos, bigger individual sponsorships and thus bigger stakes and ‘more exciting’ gameplay.
In May 2021 I tweeted about xQc and Trainwrecks etc and their streaming through Twitch, and the potential responsible gambling harms. I had truly not seen anything like it - millions frittered away by these ‘entertainers’.
Off the top of my head, I recall a few slots-erisms that I picked up from these wholly responsible streamers pissing away millions an evening:
A small/medium win = ‘a juicer’
What to shout when the reel’s spinning = ‘bonus bitch’
Gambling = ‘gamba’
Poster-boys for responsible gambling, honestly, with 120,000 spectators spamming emojis and typing ‘bonus bitch’ or ‘get us in’ over and over again. I implore you to have a watch of an old gambling VOD and you’ll be amazed at how many brain cells you can feel perishing per second.
Why is it of concern?
To anyone in the gambling industry - whether it’s over in the West where regulatory-squeeze continues and responsible gambling is a hot topic, or in the States where responsible gambling practices are already heavily considered (and that’s just in mobile sports wagering, as iGaming remains nascent) - alarm bells should surely be ringing.
In the UK we’ve had years of campaigning for football shirt sponsorship to disappear. Lord knows how everyone’ll react when they realise 120,000 people a night are watching a Canadian lad based in Texas break the law to stream and promote a Curacao-based crypto casino.
Chelsea are about to potentially sign a 1 year deal with Stake.com and that’s getting criticism - how about looking around where young people are watching actual slots being played for an obscene amount of money, with wins often glamorised, clipped and shipped for digestible highlight reels.
$100 million, wow!
Question:
How long will it take Lengyel to spaff $100 million up the wall?
On the pace of the above video, he loses:
$100,000 a minute
$1,000,000 every ten minutes
$6,000,000 every hour
Answer:
On the above pace, it would take xQc 16 hours and 40 minutes, or 1000 minutes to lose the entirety of his $100 million deal.
xQc’s deal is groundbreaking even in sports! (lol)
Esports awards for the world’s shittest take on the deal probably goes to Dexerto.
Seen this in multiple places. His $100 million contract would, if looking at a sports star salary table, put his ‘average per year’ at 13th.
xQc is not a sports star, and a brand endorsement deal is not a salary. Not sure a deal with a Curacao licensed crypto casino is as seismic as half the media are making out.
Kick is finally here to compete with Twitch!
Is it fuck.
In May 2023 the video game streaming giant saw 47 million hours watched (all content), of which 18% was video game related.
Grand Theft Auto (roleplay), Call of Duty Warzone, Fortnite, OSRS and CS:GO were the only games that appeared.
72% of all content in May was slots and just chatting, with ‘Just Sleeping’ pipping CS:GO to 9th place, leaving one of the world’s best esports languishing in 10th place.
It’s so good for streamers though
Sure, when you’ve got a crypto casino generating $2.6 billion in revenue behind you you don’t really need to take an extra 10 percent of a $5 subscription.
It’s purely, in my view, a marketing front for Stake.com, and it’s probably not that expensive to run given it seems the site struggles with more than 100k users and is just Amazon Web Services (ie a whitelabel Twitch, sigh).
They entered the scene with gusto (and this xQc deal reeks of the same bravado).
On the front page during the main launch, across the 5 streamers I clicked, there were over 1,250 subs gifted - namely from Eddie (the CEO) and Trainwrecks (the initial big name on Kick). People championing it on social media, while there are no good auto mod integrations and people are left to run riot across most channels.
This is far from a product ready to compete with anything, and throwing as much money at a wall is a daft idea too.
More questions than answers…
Dear Team xQc,
You champion the deal as truly game-changing, seismic for media and entertainment, esports and sports. World-beating, truly game-changing. Felix has got that bag, yo!
I’ve got a few questions if you don’t mind?
Where is xQc streaming from?
Will xQc’s Stake wallet be funded by Felix, or will it be house-provided money outside of the brand sponsorship deal?
Is xQc’s extra remuneration specifically linked to his affiliate code?
Location, location, location…
When I first complained about Trainwrecks and co streaming slots, TrainwrecksTV was based in Texas with the rest of the gang. Following the Twitter spat, he moved back to Canada.
For those unaware, gambling in most forms is illegal in Texas. From my understanding, playing on an offshore site will generally not cause trouble as the legal onus tends to be put on the operator.
However, once this becomes ‘advertising’ gambling, which, given he’s literally being paid $100 million to broadcast gambling, it enters more of a legal limbo.
Adin Ross, I understand, is based in Florida too which is similar to Texas in legality. Stake reportedly used to fly Adin to Mexico so he would be of legal age to gamble and stream before he turned 21 in America, though, so they obviously don’t care too much.
It’s also against Stake’s own terms of service to play from the United States. But there we are.
Whose cash is it anyway?
It’s important that consumers also know precisely what xQc is gambling with source of funds wise. If you’re going to let someone loose capable of losing millions an evening, then it’s vital the consumer knows it’s just just “house money” or the commercials are laid out.
The audacity to claim a $100 million deal with Kick (ie Stake) is a commercial behemoth if he’s able to lose the entire deal value in a couple of weeks is surely not lost on anyone? It’s literally a gambling sponsorship with a little bit of polish on it, using big numbers to grab frenzied attention.
How does xQc go from $70mill to $100 mil?
I’d be interested to know if xQc’s extra 30 million remuneration is benchmarked on performance relating to Stake.com or Kick exclusively? Is he going to be actively advertising and pushing Stake or is he 'a believer in the platform’ like he claims to be?
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Bro you didn't really do research. Stake has 0 shares in Kick and both are independent companies.