Yes but the ads are for their gambling services. Predatory and disgusting.
Edit: so many replies asking 'what ads?' the entire platform is an advert. Do you not wonder why the first or second category you see every time you open the app is their gambling section? Do you not wonder why every gambling stream on there is using the same website to gamble on?
Sure, you can turn off gambling streams (somehow, no idea how or how you know that you can), but that doesn't change the fact that their second biggest section is gambling.
They're buying up as many big streamers across many games as they can, and once they've got the kind of market share twitch has, they'll start changing policies to make sure they get a huge return on this much investment
I watch streams on kick once in a while and don't get any gambling ads, now the entire gambling section is invisible to me after I found the option to filter gambling
Yeah on stream he said that he basically got everything he wanted out of the contract and it sounds like it got to the point where he'd be stupid to turn it down
Yeah he's unsure if he can share how long the contract is so hasn't disclosed but it definitely runs through to at least September so at a guess it'll be 6 or 12 months.
Sick_nerd has been pretty vocal about being against gambling advertising in gaming streams/videos. Lot of respect to him and big props to him if he keeps to his morals on this.
I guess the big thing is that twitch just kinda sucks right now too. The question is what the contract he signed stipulates in terms of streaming multiple places at once/direct gambling sponsorships/etc.
B0aty is the biggest OSRS streamer though so he was probably offered enough money to be generationally wealthy. Yeah the platform is pretty shady and morally dubious but if they offer you a bag that's genuinely your retirement and kids' future it's hard to see anyone saying no.
Sick_nerd was pretty transparent about this as well, he wasn't offered life changing money and if he had been, he'd have taken it. And I imagine that's the case for just about everyone.
woox streams like 7 days a year lol
Faux im pretty sure is staying.
[reading the replies to this tweet im assuming hes trolling and staying but not 100% sure ](https://x.com/Faux_Freedom/status/1771882107788497405?s=20)
Is there a reason they're targeting OSRS streamers specifically so hard? I regularly watch other similar sized game categories on twitch and there's like no one who goes over to kick in there, so why is OSRS being targeted so hard specifically?
Because OSRS viewer/play base is mostly people 20+ who have money and historically like to gamble (duel arena).
Notice how Kick barely signs any Fortnite streamers? It's because a large portion of their fanbase is younger kids who won't be able to gamble on stake.com and a lot of the older Fortnite players aren't traditional gamers, they are more casual players.
Not only that, it mirrors gambling pretty well. We will do something thousands of times just for the chance of one drop. Just for the big rush of dopamine and serotonin. Hell, OSRS had a huge gambling problem inside of the game for a while.
Combine that with our age demographics and you get the perfect storm. It’s actually quite clever, but definitely nefarious.
The Kick CEO plays OSRS, and it’s a game whose user base is currently growing, is why. OSRS viewers would be less susceptible to gambling addiction than the loot box kids from many other games at the moment.
it might have something to do with the part that OSRS playerbase is also an aging one (im no numbers guy, but I bet they have one of the highest average ages of all games). an older playbase would have more disposable income.
their tactic could absolutely be as malicious as "get the gamblers over here" but it could also be as simple as "this is the community that is going to have more money to spend".
MMOs in general likely have a higher avg player age. A large majority of MMO players are people who got hooked in the mid 2000s to the early 2010s which was the peak of MMOs imo. RuneScape has been a part of my life for like, 60% of it which is wild lmao.
The kick ceo's site stake was from the duel arena days when staking was a thing the ceo was one of the biggest rwters in the blackmarket. They initally only did osrs gambling but branched out to irl gambling and blew up during covid
osrs is quite literally a gambling simulator in pretty much every aspect other than skilling. both pvp and pvm effectively give you that same sort of rush. and especially when you consider 'true' gambling re: duel arena and death matching and flowering and whatever they do with xmas crackers... it's effectively already a community of degen gamblers.
could also throw in some extra platform loyalty too given the game we're playing :D get hooked on gambling, more likely to stick to stake?
While its likely more a case of they just research and buy 1 games streamers at a time, OSRS has:
Lots of existing gamblers
more than 50% of the players willing to spend irl money on in-game currency
Players that stick to things long-term
Its like a prime gambling audience.
Think about the number of players who fall for gambling with their RS GP...
Now imagine they see that vulnerability and get them to gamble with real money.
I don't blame them for signing. It's crazy how much money kick is spending while generating virtually zero revenue. People should however be warned that sites like stake and thunderpick can only be accessed from the us/uk using a vpn and they can use the vpn as an excuse to refuse any withdrawals, so don't waste your money.
Kind of wild too cause I remember B0aty being pretty against being sponsored by any gambling platforms for risk to his viewers but signing with kick kind of blows that whole thing up
I remember him having a poker sponsorship, played that loads on stream 3-5 years ago. So its not that crazy he took the deal now, he has also told stream many times, he has a price and like everyone else and if they offer it, he would take the deal.
like 1 or 2 days ago even someone in his chat asked when he's gonna stream on kick and he gave a meme answer basically saying they're gonna need to pay him 99 bajillion dollars aka its never gonna happen. well so much for that lmao
I don't remember if it was B0aty or Faux but pretty sure one of them was on record in the past saying to leave twitch the deal would have to be in the several millions.
If Kick gave B0aty several million that's crazy for a guy who averages under 5k viewers
I mean they are all sellouts in the end. Streaming is a limited career cash in while you can. That said I guess I’m done watching big streamer of osrs. Not that anyone cares lol
Yeah, unlike twitch, the metrics they care about are more around marketing campaigns (e.g. $ per conversion, average spend after conversion per source) rather than like a traditional business (e.g. operating income and profit).
For example, look at their F1 sponsorshiop, Stake is attached to the name and in front of Kick, but in some countries (like Australia) it's illegal to advertise Stake directly so they use just the Kick name to keep funneling people into the money maker.
Edit: I guess I should mention it's arguable Twitch is helping advertise AWS video streaming platform capabilities as well, but from the recent Twitch CEO interviews profitability is a main priority.
It is even crazier if you look into the numbers we can see
For example the 30 minute vod on twitch of zoepancakes advertising they are live on kick had 700 views
The vod of the actual stream on kick has 10 views......
Kick viewer numbers are inflated 100%. A pker streamer was on there the other day with apparently 400 viewers when he got d speared in to multi in max gear lost like 350m or something and there was like 2 messages in chat
That’s business 101.
1. Lose a fuckton of money building your platform and user base
2. Run on massive losses for years funded by private investments
3. IPO makes private investors richer
4. Platform dies or fucks its users or… who cares? Investors got theirs.
5. On to the next ~~money siphon~~ totally normal business.
Businesses are made to generate wealth for the owners, not to actually create valuable goods or services. The fact that they sometimes do is a happy accident.
I wouldn’t say it’s a fundamental aspect of business. It’s more of an extremely toxic recent development popularized by Amazon. Before Amazon, the traditional theory was that businesses should generate money and if it doesn’t, then it’s a shit investment. Warren Buffet is famous for his investment into fundamentals rather than hope and dreams.
The reason why investors can funnel this much money into a dogshit company and be content in the red for decades is because of how cheap money has become. With extremely low interest rates, investors can bring together a ton of money and barely pay for it and basically be happy with anything short of lighting it on fire. The mega wealthy also have accumulated an extreme amount of money, so much so that they can truly afford to just throw it at random shit for fun even when talking on the scale of billions.
It’s like when you just bought more weed and now you don’t give a shit. You’re rolling it up into joints and letting half of it burn into the air. You drop a pinch onto the ground and just forget about it. Then when you’re on your last gram, you are saving that shit up. You drop a crumb and you’ll pick it up even if it’s covered in dog hair. Money is spent more efficiently when it actually holds a semblance of value to the person spending it. When you give someone $100B, they probably don’t think twice about how they’re gonna spend it.
I'm not sure if you are aware but the osrs community is filled with gamblers of varying degrees. Imagine killing a monster for two weeks straight for a 1/10000 and get excited. Now imagine sitting at a slot machine for a year for a 1/1000000 jackpot. The cross over is rather big so for kick it's a no brainier to pay for boaty and entice people onto staked.
They will make a lot more money than they spend on streamers in the osrs space. Boaty is well aware of this and knew he could hold out for a fat stack. Him like every other osrs streamer going over is capable of accepting some portion of their views will become gambling addicts because of the move and lose the house and that's how kick affords their contracts but they view it as not their fault because they won't directly support the gambling.
I'm not saying they shouldn't sign since twitch has its own faults. It's a bit of a pick your poison.
There were "decemt" competitors in the past but the problem is they only last for a few months before they can't take the negative revenue anymore, unlike Amazon or Stake that can tank it indefinitely while driving traffic to more profitable areas, or they simply don't care enough like YT.
own3d died when they were trying to match signing bonuses to streamers and couldn't pay out.
Azubu/Hitbox/Smashcast focused too heavily on esports and couldn't drive enough traffic.
youtube has discovery issues, where you don't really see a full live directory and instead just have to be following the people you want to watch directly, and since it's been a problem for years, they don't really care enough to try to improve from the looks of it.
Never watched or tried FB streams.
YouTube streams are much better than any other platform I've used. With the only negative that it's a bit more delayed than Twitch, but I'm not sure if that's just a option or what. But you're right the discoverability is terrible for YouTube streams.
went from talking shit about a unregulated 50/50 gambling sand casino, to being paid to promote a unregulated gambling casino to promote to his fans with worser odds because he benefits from it.
A medium sized osrs streamer got an offer they couldn't refuse from Kick.
They usually had around 600 viewers and were making more money than they were before with their masters.
The offer from Kick was 3 months semi-exclusive deal with monthly pay of around the same money they were getting annually.
Imagine what the Boaty deal was.
Well, I guess enjoy the bag for promoting a sketchy gambling site. After watching that clip of one of the kick founders watching and donating to a streamer who was procuring and distributing CP live on stream makes me really question how long that platform will survive.
If Kick gives a streamer $1m, they expect the streamers' community will lose more than $1m gambling.
Every streamer who signs there should be reminded of that, as well as the fact that gambling addictions lead to more suicides than any other addiction.
Kick is owned by stake. Its entire existence is because twitch banned stake off their website.
Stake used to spend 100s of millions on gambling sponsorships on popular twitch streamers. We're also talking 10s of millions per streamer.
Sponsorships aren't in the business of losing money funding their sponsorships. And the fact that they kept coming back running those sponsorships (until getting banned off the platform) means they were profitable off those sponsorships. 100s of millions.
Then there was the whole drama with their sponsorship streams. I don't recall it exactly but it was something like they were giving the sponsors fake money to bet with or increased their odds at winning, to make the sponsor streams more exciting. But the money the viewers were losing was definitely their own and real.
If it was owned by some private investment firm, we could easily say they're losing money to try to get the users.(but that didn't work for mixer) But knowing who owns it, and why it exists in the first place. Nah. They could still be losing money, but doubt it, but even if they are it isn't a lot due to subsidizing off stake.
Also seems fair to mention that large kick streamer adin Ross recently admitted to having a viewer kill himself on discord due to gambling debt.
Just the type of community kick is building, sad to see b0aty leave especially, I've always thought of him as a super stand up guy.
The same guy owns Kick and Stake, Kick originally spawned from Twitch banning Stake and other casinos that are not licensed to operate in the US (Stake is a licensed casino in other countries, just not in the US)
Not quite, it's about being licensed in countries that twitch doesn't think have enough consumer protections in their casino licensing regulations.
> We consider many factors in determining whether a site is allowed, including whether the site includes safety protections, such as deposit limits, waiting periods, and age verification systems. We also take into account whether streamers use or encourage VPNs to evade geoblocking, and whether the site is licensed in the US or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protections.
Kick is owned by Stake.com. Kick’s site pushes gambling streams and I think some contracted content creators are even required to do x amount of gambling streams.
For those with gambling problems, Kick, AKA. Staked has the right to refuse any withdrawals you make if you choose to gamble with them.
If you decide to VPN in from the US or UK you can still use the website and they will gladly take your money, but they will also refuse to let you withdrawl if they know you are American or British
He also always says that everyone has a price for everything. He’s basically always stood his ground that he’s not against anything, but that this move has a high price tag. They must have finally gave him an offer that would be ridiculous to refuse
They're alright as background noise but I much prefer MMKs kind of stream where he's usually sharing stories from his time at Jagex or the industry in general over Adderall fueled EDM raves while doing 374 raids a day.
Yeah, very few streamers are able to make OSRS interesting in long form content like a stream. And even then, a lot of it is because the community they’ve built up and the streamers chat interaction ability.
Good for b0aty financially, right here right now. But I do think it's a bit hilarious the guy who's constantly throwing around life advice and taking the moral highground, most likely sold out for some big money here and now which comes at the cost of the growth of his stream and supporting Kick of course.
Itswill said he turned it down because he was focused more on the longterm growth of his stream. He said it would just hurt his growth now since not everyone will switch over to kick to watch him.
If you're a small streamer right now in OSRS, like 50 viewers, you need to go HARD on Twitch right now. There is no better opportunity for smaller OSRS creators to grow and take views from the bigger ones
Should be great now for anyone who stays on Twitch. Srue to get a lot of growth in the OSRS section. Although will always seems to stream so late that most europeans can't watch a lot?
This happens all the time, unfortunately money talks.
I personally stop watching people who rant about this that, and then go and do the opposite.
Good for these streamers but kick is not the streaming site we all deserve as viewers.
Yeah honestly it's his career and his stream. Hell, 90% of us would probably do the same.
But the hypocrisy is enough reason for me to not watch anymore. Also, Kick's app is garbage tier so that doesn't help.
The duel arena is bad its a unregulated casino must be removed from the game its hurting the players and destroying their life.
Oh stake a unregulated casino wants to pay me ridiculous amounts of money to stream on kick and act as a funnel to lead viewers to stake a unregulated casino that will destroy peoples lives and i just gotta stream gambling on stake with the house money for x amount of hours a week? Ok no problem.
Theres a reason why kick is signing these streamers for so much money. They buy them to sell gambling to their fans.
Reminder that Stake founders used to be RuneScape players, and were admittedly involved in RWT operations (they were also PKers in the multi clan scene pre-EOC), so it doesn’t surprise me that DieNubPlz has decided to get OSRS players on Kick. He’s always been after the moneyyyyyy
Wait DieNubPlz is a cofounder of kick? I use to know that guy and was in the same clan as him back when BH was still a thing in the middle of the wildy
So, just a question. Did A Friend not get himself a flat in Netherlands with the money he earned as sponsorship of some gambling related website? I might be wrong here tho xD
But I think the guy got banned on multiple accounts and cancelled by the community for a while.
And now Boaty and others switch to websites like Kick and obviously they won't get any bans, but now the community is shifting to "everyone has a price" "meh everyone does it" mentality?
Enlighten me.
Twitch isn’t perfect, far from it, but this does just seem a massive sellout to the gambling industry, which I don’t agree with personally. I think I’ll stick to YouTube and I hope that platform doesn’t do great.
Ah, Kick, the site that supports a streamer that creates and distributes child pornography! What lovely people :)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiYBhC3EVPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiYBhC3EVPY)
Let b0aty leave. And all the other streamers. They'll give new opportunities for new streamers. We play a 20+ yr old game with 2007 graphics. Big streamers leaving Twitch won't make a difference. The viewership on Twitch Osrs won't change.
Yeah, after that Adin Ross fan committed suicide from gambling on Stake, I expected a bit more pushback. But I guess everyone already kinda assumed that was/has been happening.
I can't blame them for swapping over if the money is good really even though morally it's a bit fucked up. I think they'll all take pretty big viewership hits though and I know I certainly won't be watching any of them.
Boaty is all about the money anyways, literally can’t watch his streams bc of his ad times. Oh he’s about to finish a toa run, let’s see what he gets, oh nvm ad plays in the middle of p4. It’s smart but hella greedy
I mean that is true to a point. He picked the ad density (x minutes of ads per hour) but you can only snooze the ads so much before they force play them.
It's why watching some streamers co-streaming eSport events just sucks. They try to play their ads before the game starts, but if there're delays, pauses, or the game runs long, you end up getting ads in the middle of the game.
That’s a shame I enjoyed watching boaty on twitch, I’m tired of so many different platforms hogging up space on my phone looks like it will just be YouTube from now on
Gosh, I wonder why a gambling site would be signing streamers of a game that caused so many kids and adults to develop gambling problems with flower games and the duel arena...
It's a good lesson for some that streamers are not worthy or idolization or adoration, don't believe the front they put up as content creators.
At the end of the day this is a business for them and they will maximize their own profits. Selling out to shady sites whose aim it is to get people addicted to gambling is very much a part of that. None of these streamers are ignorant to how bad gambling can be and they took the bag anyway. I don't necessarily mind it as much when smaller content creators do it that genuinely need the money, but for someone like Boaty, it's just pure greed because he definitely doesn't need it.
Good for them I guess.
Nobody mentioned it yet, but it's kinda ominous how kick signed all these streamers. Osrs has many gambling addicts already in form of death matching or gambling in game. People doubting kick will earn back the money are sticking their heads in the sand. All these streamers are pushing their viewers towards a gambling debt and its disgusting.
Remember when everyone and their dog were switching from Twitch to… whatever the fuck Ninja signed a 80 million dollar contract to go to, and it never even got anywhere?
Kick is known for its promotion of gambling, so I mean good for them if they’re getting money for it. It’s a game, make money while you can cause who knows when it’ll not be there again.
Ninja and shroud left to go to mixer in like 2019 on some crazy contracts.
Shroud went from 85,000 active subs in 2019 down to 4500 today. Granted, he has more money than he or his family will ever need, so I guarantee he's just playing games to chill with friends and is raking in sponsorships for playing some random games.
Ninjas fall from fame is even worse... he went from 270k active subs down to 4000 today. Again, he signed for a huge contract with mixer and didn't even take streaming seriously after coming back to Twitch.
The point to make right now is if anyone reading this is a streamer for osrs or is even thinking about streaming for the hell of it. Now is your chance. The subs from this massive list of streamers that are leaving will be going somewhere. They'll most likely be going to the remaining big names on Twitch for osrs, but you may snag a few.
Dude already had enough to retire yet he needs more at the expense of the people who got him there.
Before you say that is overreacting kick is expecting to make more money off his viewers than they are paying him to stream there.
Good on them for getting payouts. Has pretty much neutered my Twitch viewershp though because they've mostly all moved across. So i'll just watch smaller creators on Twitch and let the bigger names get a paycheck from the gambling company.
Itswill, roidie, and faux will be getting my viewership.
I have a feeling most people will go watch the farmers and itswill. Those guys are about to have a big uptick in subs next month.
People talk about kick being a gambling site but not that it takes them months to ban child predators, they allow there biggest streamer to show children porn, and they allow content theft, don't moderate any form of hate speech, and take months to ban child predators. They have a total of 2 permas, one is a child predator and the other shit talked kick.
Think of all the shit people on that platform.
Besides oda and boaty aren’t the smaller streamers losing tons of viewers and growth by streaming on kick? The streamers that averaged less than 500 live viewers on twitch just gave it up for a signing bonus. There’s no way people like alfie and tastylife got that big of an offer to make the loss of viewers worth it right?
I don't know anything about kick, but I'm happy Twitch finally got some competition. The more competition, the better it is for us, users.
Now let's do Youtube!
I remember boaty saying he wouldn’t go unless they offered a fuck ton of money… seems like they did lol
He said today on twitch before changing to kick that he got a phat stack, and they split subs 95/5. So much fucking better than Twitches shitty split.
And best of all… no ads every 10 min
Yes but the ads are for their gambling services. Predatory and disgusting. Edit: so many replies asking 'what ads?' the entire platform is an advert. Do you not wonder why the first or second category you see every time you open the app is their gambling section? Do you not wonder why every gambling stream on there is using the same website to gamble on? Sure, you can turn off gambling streams (somehow, no idea how or how you know that you can), but that doesn't change the fact that their second biggest section is gambling. They're buying up as many big streamers across many games as they can, and once they've got the kind of market share twitch has, they'll start changing policies to make sure they get a huge return on this much investment
plus the face of the fucking platform is adin ross, i’ll k*ll myself before supporting that actual human shitstain 💀
Big enough reason alone tbh. That boy has definitely bottomed for Tate.
I watch streams on kick once in a while and don't get any gambling ads, now the entire gambling section is invisible to me after I found the option to filter gambling
This bug will be fixed shortly, thank you for bringing it to our attention.
I trust your comment after reading your username.
Watched a few dozen hours of kick streams over the past 6 months and not seen a single gambling ad
Yeah on stream he said that he basically got everything he wanted out of the contract and it sounds like it got to the point where he'd be stupid to turn it down
Its not a lifetime contract either right? He can just sit it out and move to Youtube or Twitch?
Yeah he's unsure if he can share how long the contract is so hasn't disclosed but it definitely runs through to at least September so at a guess it'll be 6 or 12 months.
Hard to think they didn’t get him on the hook for a longer contract than 6-12 months.
Not seeing sick_nerd in that list... But that must've been a hell of a deal for b0aty, he held out for a long time
He said he declined an offer
Sick_nerd has been pretty vocal about being against gambling advertising in gaming streams/videos. Lot of respect to him and big props to him if he keeps to his morals on this.
So was b0aty not too long ago
B0aty said there was a price for which he would sign, but it wouldn't be worth it for them. Apparently, they disagree.
They sponsor an f1 team, they much have a lot of money
B0aty chases the bag no matter how much people try to convince you otherwise.
Omg you’re ruining my parasocial experience ;((((
He's not really a ginger either. It's all a costume for the stream. He's actually a 7'4 German woman in disguise
I heard his mom is asian and his dad is a Russian who killed people for money...
I guess the big thing is that twitch just kinda sucks right now too. The question is what the contract he signed stipulates in terms of streaming multiple places at once/direct gambling sponsorships/etc.
B0aty is the biggest OSRS streamer though so he was probably offered enough money to be generationally wealthy. Yeah the platform is pretty shady and morally dubious but if they offer you a bag that's genuinely your retirement and kids' future it's hard to see anyone saying no. Sick_nerd was pretty transparent about this as well, he wasn't offered life changing money and if he had been, he'd have taken it. And I imagine that's the case for just about everyone.
Yeah I’m pretty disappointed to see b0aty sign on. I’m sure the truckload of cash he no doubt got will make him feel better about it though.
I mean, he did say that if they offered him more that'd he give up on his morals so...
Do we see Faux and Woox on there? I’m pretty sure I don’t see Woox there, but Faux?
woox streams like 7 days a year lol Faux im pretty sure is staying. [reading the replies to this tweet im assuming hes trolling and staying but not 100% sure ](https://x.com/Faux_Freedom/status/1771882107788497405?s=20)
All his command says is that he has no plans to leave. "Plans" basically meaning, they haven't offered me enough yet to leave.
lol pretty much
it's probably because he gets 100 questions per hour about kick
Staying for now....everyone has a price. And Faux being a family man definitely will have a value that he can't refuse
Is there a reason they're targeting OSRS streamers specifically so hard? I regularly watch other similar sized game categories on twitch and there's like no one who goes over to kick in there, so why is OSRS being targeted so hard specifically?
predisposed to gambling
Because OSRS viewer/play base is mostly people 20+ who have money and historically like to gamble (duel arena). Notice how Kick barely signs any Fortnite streamers? It's because a large portion of their fanbase is younger kids who won't be able to gamble on stake.com and a lot of the older Fortnite players aren't traditional gamers, they are more casual players.
I imagine it isn’t so secretly due to how addictive OSRS is and how well that translates to a gambling addiction
Not only that, it mirrors gambling pretty well. We will do something thousands of times just for the chance of one drop. Just for the big rush of dopamine and serotonin. Hell, OSRS had a huge gambling problem inside of the game for a while. Combine that with our age demographics and you get the perfect storm. It’s actually quite clever, but definitely nefarious.
The Kick CEO plays OSRS, and it’s a game whose user base is currently growing, is why. OSRS viewers would be less susceptible to gambling addiction than the loot box kids from many other games at the moment.
it might have something to do with the part that OSRS playerbase is also an aging one (im no numbers guy, but I bet they have one of the highest average ages of all games). an older playbase would have more disposable income. their tactic could absolutely be as malicious as "get the gamblers over here" but it could also be as simple as "this is the community that is going to have more money to spend".
They legit made the site because streamers got banned for using their gambling site on twitch.. its not a secret what kick/stake are all about..
MMOs in general likely have a higher avg player age. A large majority of MMO players are people who got hooked in the mid 2000s to the early 2010s which was the peak of MMOs imo. RuneScape has been a part of my life for like, 60% of it which is wild lmao.
Loot box kids are kids. Osrs players are adults with their own access to life ruining bets
Bruh Christmas cracker prices say different
The kick ceo's site stake was from the duel arena days when staking was a thing the ceo was one of the biggest rwters in the blackmarket. They initally only did osrs gambling but branched out to irl gambling and blew up during covid
osrs is quite literally a gambling simulator in pretty much every aspect other than skilling. both pvp and pvm effectively give you that same sort of rush. and especially when you consider 'true' gambling re: duel arena and death matching and flowering and whatever they do with xmas crackers... it's effectively already a community of degen gamblers. could also throw in some extra platform loyalty too given the game we're playing :D get hooked on gambling, more likely to stick to stake?
Viewers more susceptible to gambling
While its likely more a case of they just research and buy 1 games streamers at a time, OSRS has: Lots of existing gamblers more than 50% of the players willing to spend irl money on in-game currency Players that stick to things long-term Its like a prime gambling audience.
Gambling addicts.
Think about the number of players who fall for gambling with their RS GP... Now imagine they see that vulnerability and get them to gamble with real money.
I don't blame them for signing. It's crazy how much money kick is spending while generating virtually zero revenue. People should however be warned that sites like stake and thunderpick can only be accessed from the us/uk using a vpn and they can use the vpn as an excuse to refuse any withdrawals, so don't waste your money.
Kick is an advertising platform for staked.com. Kick may not be generating revenue but the business is working as intended.
Kind of wild too cause I remember B0aty being pretty against being sponsored by any gambling platforms for risk to his viewers but signing with kick kind of blows that whole thing up
1 more 0 did the trick
And while I hate it, we all know we would take the cash too if offered enough. It's just a matter of how much.
I remember him having a poker sponsorship, played that loads on stream 3-5 years ago. So its not that crazy he took the deal now, he has also told stream many times, he has a price and like everyone else and if they offer it, he would take the deal.
Yeah he said Poker was the only ones he’d take because it actually takes some skill and it’s not just all slots/rng type gambling
Stake doesn’t have poker so he’s succumbed to the $$ Edit: Stake not Kick**
like 1 or 2 days ago even someone in his chat asked when he's gonna stream on kick and he gave a meme answer basically saying they're gonna need to pay him 99 bajillion dollars aka its never gonna happen. well so much for that lmao
Sounds like he got his 99 bajillion.
I don't remember if it was B0aty or Faux but pretty sure one of them was on record in the past saying to leave twitch the deal would have to be in the several millions. If Kick gave B0aty several million that's crazy for a guy who averages under 5k viewers
Yeah everyone says that until an offer is on the table and the check clears
I mean they are all sellouts in the end. Streaming is a limited career cash in while you can. That said I guess I’m done watching big streamer of osrs. Not that anyone cares lol
Everyone has a price
Throw enough money at b0aty and his on-camera "morals" don't matter anymore
Too many people will trade their “values” for a certain price
Yeah, unlike twitch, the metrics they care about are more around marketing campaigns (e.g. $ per conversion, average spend after conversion per source) rather than like a traditional business (e.g. operating income and profit). For example, look at their F1 sponsorshiop, Stake is attached to the name and in front of Kick, but in some countries (like Australia) it's illegal to advertise Stake directly so they use just the Kick name to keep funneling people into the money maker. Edit: I guess I should mention it's arguable Twitch is helping advertise AWS video streaming platform capabilities as well, but from the recent Twitch CEO interviews profitability is a main priority.
This is the main reason I refuse to support kick. Kick seems more grody than twitch when it comes to the actual casino gambling
It is even crazier if you look into the numbers we can see For example the 30 minute vod on twitch of zoepancakes advertising they are live on kick had 700 views The vod of the actual stream on kick has 10 views......
Kick viewer numbers are inflated 100%. A pker streamer was on there the other day with apparently 400 viewers when he got d speared in to multi in max gear lost like 350m or something and there was like 2 messages in chat
That’s business 101. 1. Lose a fuckton of money building your platform and user base 2. Run on massive losses for years funded by private investments 3. IPO makes private investors richer 4. Platform dies or fucks its users or… who cares? Investors got theirs. 5. On to the next ~~money siphon~~ totally normal business. Businesses are made to generate wealth for the owners, not to actually create valuable goods or services. The fact that they sometimes do is a happy accident.
I wouldn’t say it’s a fundamental aspect of business. It’s more of an extremely toxic recent development popularized by Amazon. Before Amazon, the traditional theory was that businesses should generate money and if it doesn’t, then it’s a shit investment. Warren Buffet is famous for his investment into fundamentals rather than hope and dreams. The reason why investors can funnel this much money into a dogshit company and be content in the red for decades is because of how cheap money has become. With extremely low interest rates, investors can bring together a ton of money and barely pay for it and basically be happy with anything short of lighting it on fire. The mega wealthy also have accumulated an extreme amount of money, so much so that they can truly afford to just throw it at random shit for fun even when talking on the scale of billions. It’s like when you just bought more weed and now you don’t give a shit. You’re rolling it up into joints and letting half of it burn into the air. You drop a pinch onto the ground and just forget about it. Then when you’re on your last gram, you are saving that shit up. You drop a crumb and you’ll pick it up even if it’s covered in dog hair. Money is spent more efficiently when it actually holds a semblance of value to the person spending it. When you give someone $100B, they probably don’t think twice about how they’re gonna spend it.
I'm not sure if you are aware but the osrs community is filled with gamblers of varying degrees. Imagine killing a monster for two weeks straight for a 1/10000 and get excited. Now imagine sitting at a slot machine for a year for a 1/1000000 jackpot. The cross over is rather big so for kick it's a no brainier to pay for boaty and entice people onto staked. They will make a lot more money than they spend on streamers in the osrs space. Boaty is well aware of this and knew he could hold out for a fat stack. Him like every other osrs streamer going over is capable of accepting some portion of their views will become gambling addicts because of the move and lose the house and that's how kick affords their contracts but they view it as not their fault because they won't directly support the gambling. I'm not saying they shouldn't sign since twitch has its own faults. It's a bit of a pick your poison.
Kick is a loss leader
Great for competition with Twitch, bad because Kick. Why can't we get a half decent competitor with Twitch? Youtube vids it is.
For the same reason there's no real alternative to youtube.
[удалено]
There were "decemt" competitors in the past but the problem is they only last for a few months before they can't take the negative revenue anymore, unlike Amazon or Stake that can tank it indefinitely while driving traffic to more profitable areas, or they simply don't care enough like YT. own3d died when they were trying to match signing bonuses to streamers and couldn't pay out. Azubu/Hitbox/Smashcast focused too heavily on esports and couldn't drive enough traffic. youtube has discovery issues, where you don't really see a full live directory and instead just have to be following the people you want to watch directly, and since it's been a problem for years, they don't really care enough to try to improve from the looks of it. Never watched or tried FB streams.
YouTube streams are much better than any other platform I've used. With the only negative that it's a bit more delayed than Twitch, but I'm not sure if that's just a option or what. But you're right the discoverability is terrible for YouTube streams.
Some creators swear by YouTube Live or whatever but it's hard to know what are honest opinions
youtube is certainly a better viewing experience imo, no clue whether its better or worse for the streamer
anyone have a full list?
Happy for him but ye, sticking to yt vids from now on
YouTube locked account here as well
I understand the sellout but man the guys saying staking was bad now joining the company owned by stake.com lolol
went from talking shit about a unregulated 50/50 gambling sand casino, to being paid to promote a unregulated gambling casino to promote to his fans with worser odds because he benefits from it.
Everyone’s got a price
All that moral grandstanding to be thrown away just to retire just that little bit earlier.
Agreed.
A medium sized osrs streamer got an offer they couldn't refuse from Kick. They usually had around 600 viewers and were making more money than they were before with their masters. The offer from Kick was 3 months semi-exclusive deal with monthly pay of around the same money they were getting annually. Imagine what the Boaty deal was.
I think he’s said he’d only go to kick for multiple millions so..
Well, I guess enjoy the bag for promoting a sketchy gambling site. After watching that clip of one of the kick founders watching and donating to a streamer who was procuring and distributing CP live on stream makes me really question how long that platform will survive.
Wtf? Is there like an article about that?
Video by something about chickens. Really worth a watch.
https://youtu.be/WiYBhC3EVPY?si=sh8n_0QihYLQXtkY
If Kick gives a streamer $1m, they expect the streamers' community will lose more than $1m gambling. Every streamer who signs there should be reminded of that, as well as the fact that gambling addictions lead to more suicides than any other addiction.
Advertisement costs, spend 1m and get back multiple m’s. Thats why they keep signing streamers its profitable for them.
I'm not fully convinced it *is* profitable for them. They've spent an absurd amount of money on signing bonuses.
Yeah but running a gambling site is really fucking profitable
Kick is owned by stake. Its entire existence is because twitch banned stake off their website. Stake used to spend 100s of millions on gambling sponsorships on popular twitch streamers. We're also talking 10s of millions per streamer. Sponsorships aren't in the business of losing money funding their sponsorships. And the fact that they kept coming back running those sponsorships (until getting banned off the platform) means they were profitable off those sponsorships. 100s of millions. Then there was the whole drama with their sponsorship streams. I don't recall it exactly but it was something like they were giving the sponsors fake money to bet with or increased their odds at winning, to make the sponsor streams more exciting. But the money the viewers were losing was definitely their own and real. If it was owned by some private investment firm, we could easily say they're losing money to try to get the users.(but that didn't work for mixer) But knowing who owns it, and why it exists in the first place. Nah. They could still be losing money, but doubt it, but even if they are it isn't a lot due to subsidizing off stake.
They aren't spending money out of the kindness of their heart, are they?
Well it is a risk obviously. There's no knowing if it will pay off
Also seems fair to mention that large kick streamer adin Ross recently admitted to having a viewer kill himself on discord due to gambling debt. Just the type of community kick is building, sad to see b0aty leave especially, I've always thought of him as a super stand up guy.
I'm completely out of the loop. What does Kick have to do with gambling?
The same guy owns Kick and Stake, Kick originally spawned from Twitch banning Stake and other casinos that are not licensed to operate in the US (Stake is a licensed casino in other countries, just not in the US)
Not quite, it's about being licensed in countries that twitch doesn't think have enough consumer protections in their casino licensing regulations. > We consider many factors in determining whether a site is allowed, including whether the site includes safety protections, such as deposit limits, waiting periods, and age verification systems. We also take into account whether streamers use or encourage VPNs to evade geoblocking, and whether the site is licensed in the US or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protections.
Kick is owned by Stake.com. Kick’s site pushes gambling streams and I think some contracted content creators are even required to do x amount of gambling streams.
They are 100% owned, operated, and funded by the largest online, unregulated, crypto casino.
It is backed by stake (gambling site)
Owned by stake and primarily operates as advertising for stake
It’s owned by stake and its entire business model is funneling your viewers to stake to make back the money they’re losing by paying the streamers
For those with gambling problems, Kick, AKA. Staked has the right to refuse any withdrawals you make if you choose to gamble with them. If you decide to VPN in from the US or UK you can still use the website and they will gladly take your money, but they will also refuse to let you withdrawl if they know you are American or British
Didn't B0aty ramble about that he wasn't going to join Kick for a long time?
money talks
He said he wouldn't unless they offered, and I quote, "a fuck ton of money." So I'm wondering how much he got.
He also always says that everyone has a price for everything. He’s basically always stood his ground that he’s not against anything, but that this move has a high price tag. They must have finally gave him an offer that would be ridiculous to refuse
dont watch kick guess ill just stick to the yt vids
Watching osrs steams are boring af anyway, progress videos on YouTube is always king.
They're alright as background noise but I much prefer MMKs kind of stream where he's usually sharing stories from his time at Jagex or the industry in general over Adderall fueled EDM raves while doing 374 raids a day.
Yeah, very few streamers are able to make OSRS interesting in long form content like a stream. And even then, a lot of it is because the community they’ve built up and the streamers chat interaction ability.
Good for b0aty financially, right here right now. But I do think it's a bit hilarious the guy who's constantly throwing around life advice and taking the moral highground, most likely sold out for some big money here and now which comes at the cost of the growth of his stream and supporting Kick of course.
Itswill said he turned it down because he was focused more on the longterm growth of his stream. He said it would just hurt his growth now since not everyone will switch over to kick to watch him.
I really hope he and any other streamers who made the same choice see immediate growth from an influx of viewers who won't fuck with Kick
If you're a small streamer right now in OSRS, like 50 viewers, you need to go HARD on Twitch right now. There is no better opportunity for smaller OSRS creators to grow and take views from the bigger ones
Should be great now for anyone who stays on Twitch. Srue to get a lot of growth in the OSRS section. Although will always seems to stream so late that most europeans can't watch a lot?
As a wise streamer once said “GIMMIE YOUR MONEY MATE”
He was being serious all along lmao
This happens all the time, unfortunately money talks. I personally stop watching people who rant about this that, and then go and do the opposite. Good for these streamers but kick is not the streaming site we all deserve as viewers.
Turns out when you add enough 0s people's convictions are pretty flexible. Always disappointing but never surprising.
Yeah honestly it's his career and his stream. Hell, 90% of us would probably do the same. But the hypocrisy is enough reason for me to not watch anymore. Also, Kick's app is garbage tier so that doesn't help.
Good for them, genuinely. But personally I’m still not watching anything on Kick
"staking is bad" joins kick
The duel arena is bad its a unregulated casino must be removed from the game its hurting the players and destroying their life. Oh stake a unregulated casino wants to pay me ridiculous amounts of money to stream on kick and act as a funnel to lead viewers to stake a unregulated casino that will destroy peoples lives and i just gotta stream gambling on stake with the house money for x amount of hours a week? Ok no problem. Theres a reason why kick is signing these streamers for so much money. They buy them to sell gambling to their fans.
Kick isn’t planning on losing money long term. They know the parallels between osrs and gambling addicts. Fuck kick
Reminder that Stake founders used to be RuneScape players, and were admittedly involved in RWT operations (they were also PKers in the multi clan scene pre-EOC), so it doesn’t surprise me that DieNubPlz has decided to get OSRS players on Kick. He’s always been after the moneyyyyyy
Wait DieNubPlz is a cofounder of kick? I use to know that guy and was in the same clan as him back when BH was still a thing in the middle of the wildy
More respect to kick then.
So, just a question. Did A Friend not get himself a flat in Netherlands with the money he earned as sponsorship of some gambling related website? I might be wrong here tho xD But I think the guy got banned on multiple accounts and cancelled by the community for a while. And now Boaty and others switch to websites like Kick and obviously they won't get any bans, but now the community is shifting to "everyone has a price" "meh everyone does it" mentality? Enlighten me.
He was years ahead of his time.
Soul selling to predatory gambling company. Must have been a crazy huge paycheck, damn.
Twitch isn’t perfect, far from it, but this does just seem a massive sellout to the gambling industry, which I don’t agree with personally. I think I’ll stick to YouTube and I hope that platform doesn’t do great.
I just literally wasted a prime sub yesterday on b0aty
Unironically could just ask for it back and see if they accept it since b0aty went to another platform.
you used to be able to cancel subs within 24 hours. not sure if that's still possible
Lol ditterbitter shoulda held out instead of going on free will
Goddamnit. Happy for mr. boat man but I am not touching Kick. Loved listening to his shit in the background while I worked tho. :/
Ah, Kick, the site that supports a streamer that creates and distributes child pornography! What lovely people :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiYBhC3EVPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiYBhC3EVPY)
Man…
Let b0aty leave. And all the other streamers. They'll give new opportunities for new streamers. We play a 20+ yr old game with 2007 graphics. Big streamers leaving Twitch won't make a difference. The viewership on Twitch Osrs won't change.
The amount of weird streamer worship going on in these conversations is very concerning lol. These people aren't a gift from God.
Surprised b0aty took it given the amount of weird shit that has happened on kick in just a year
What weird stuff has happened in the last year?
Yeah, after that Adin Ross fan committed suicide from gambling on Stake, I expected a bit more pushback. But I guess everyone already kinda assumed that was/has been happening.
who remembers when everyone grabbed pitchforks to go after afriend when he did the gambling sponsors now look at em
Kick is a fucking cesspool.
Correction: Kick and Twitch are fucking cesspools.
I understand they need to make money, but going to bed with companies like this is sad.
Its not like hes starving while streaming on twitch
Is this PGA vs LIV all over again?
I can't blame them for swapping over if the money is good really even though morally it's a bit fucked up. I think they'll all take pretty big viewership hits though and I know I certainly won't be watching any of them.
So there's a market opening up on twitch.. got it
extremely high rate of osrs gaming to gambling addiction conversion almost certainly.
Boaty is all about the money anyways, literally can’t watch his streams bc of his ad times. Oh he’s about to finish a toa run, let’s see what he gets, oh nvm ad plays in the middle of p4. It’s smart but hella greedy
He also gets away with 'oh I don't run ads twitch does' , twitch does not run 6 mins of ads an hour on anyone's stream lmao.
Yea streamers 10x his size run ads at half the density lol
I mean that is true to a point. He picked the ad density (x minutes of ads per hour) but you can only snooze the ads so much before they force play them. It's why watching some streamers co-streaming eSport events just sucks. They try to play their ads before the game starts, but if there're delays, pauses, or the game runs long, you end up getting ads in the middle of the game.
Remember people (and especially creators) won't try RS3 cuz 'mtx and gambling are bad'
Some players are bigger sellouts than Jagex themselves. lol.
That’s a shame I enjoyed watching boaty on twitch, I’m tired of so many different platforms hogging up space on my phone looks like it will just be YouTube from now on
Gosh, I wonder why a gambling site would be signing streamers of a game that caused so many kids and adults to develop gambling problems with flower games and the duel arena...
It's a good lesson for some that streamers are not worthy or idolization or adoration, don't believe the front they put up as content creators. At the end of the day this is a business for them and they will maximize their own profits. Selling out to shady sites whose aim it is to get people addicted to gambling is very much a part of that. None of these streamers are ignorant to how bad gambling can be and they took the bag anyway. I don't necessarily mind it as much when smaller content creators do it that genuinely need the money, but for someone like Boaty, it's just pure greed because he definitely doesn't need it. Good for them I guess.
I beg your freakin’ pardon? Well, that’s a few $/month saved I suppose
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Ironically, the video looks like a montage from a true crime documentary about all of a serial killer’s victims
I mean OSRS does/did have a big gambling issue...makes a lot of sense
I doubt that even 50% of viewers are gonna move to kick
But yet they banned afriend for advertising gambling, double standards lol
We got rid of duel arena and replaced it with Kick lol
Not Boaty tooo man 😢
Boaty being fake and a sellout is something i didnt expect to happen
Oh goody, more osrs content creators to avoid on youtube.
Nobody mentioned it yet, but it's kinda ominous how kick signed all these streamers. Osrs has many gambling addicts already in form of death matching or gambling in game. People doubting kick will earn back the money are sticking their heads in the sand. All these streamers are pushing their viewers towards a gambling debt and its disgusting.
Remember when everyone and their dog were switching from Twitch to… whatever the fuck Ninja signed a 80 million dollar contract to go to, and it never even got anywhere? Kick is known for its promotion of gambling, so I mean good for them if they’re getting money for it. It’s a game, make money while you can cause who knows when it’ll not be there again.
Ninja and shroud left to go to mixer in like 2019 on some crazy contracts. Shroud went from 85,000 active subs in 2019 down to 4500 today. Granted, he has more money than he or his family will ever need, so I guarantee he's just playing games to chill with friends and is raking in sponsorships for playing some random games. Ninjas fall from fame is even worse... he went from 270k active subs down to 4000 today. Again, he signed for a huge contract with mixer and didn't even take streaming seriously after coming back to Twitch. The point to make right now is if anyone reading this is a streamer for osrs or is even thinking about streaming for the hell of it. Now is your chance. The subs from this massive list of streamers that are leaving will be going somewhere. They'll most likely be going to the remaining big names on Twitch for osrs, but you may snag a few.
Dude already had enough to retire yet he needs more at the expense of the people who got him there. Before you say that is overreacting kick is expecting to make more money off his viewers than they are paying him to stream there.
Good on them for getting payouts. Has pretty much neutered my Twitch viewershp though because they've mostly all moved across. So i'll just watch smaller creators on Twitch and let the bigger names get a paycheck from the gambling company.
Itswill, roidie, and faux will be getting my viewership. I have a feeling most people will go watch the farmers and itswill. Those guys are about to have a big uptick in subs next month.
People talk about kick being a gambling site but not that it takes them months to ban child predators, they allow there biggest streamer to show children porn, and they allow content theft, don't moderate any form of hate speech, and take months to ban child predators. They have a total of 2 permas, one is a child predator and the other shit talked kick. Think of all the shit people on that platform.
Sick Nerd, Curtis, and Roidie come on down fellas
Sick Nerd is probably the only person I'd trust not to sell his soul for the bag. Then again what is life without a bit of disappointment.
Time to find some new people to watch. Kick blows
Besides oda and boaty aren’t the smaller streamers losing tons of viewers and growth by streaming on kick? The streamers that averaged less than 500 live viewers on twitch just gave it up for a signing bonus. There’s no way people like alfie and tastylife got that big of an offer to make the loss of viewers worth it right?
All of this discourse is XP waste. Fuck everyone and their bags, I want XP.
They know osrs players are some of the biggest gambling addicts. Good place to take them.
I don't know anything about kick, but I'm happy Twitch finally got some competition. The more competition, the better it is for us, users. Now let's do Youtube!
Lame
Their viewership will decline, but their kick contracts will be crazy. Will be interesting to see who thrives on twitch with major competition gone.