Twitch “Slots” Is Second Biggest Non-Gaming Section in 2021

Twitch has clocked in another record year, with the platform’s watched hours increasing by 45% on a year-over-year basis. The Amazon-owned giant managed to pull in as many as 24 billion hours watched in 2021 compared to 17 billion hours watched in 2020 based on a report by Rainmaker.gg and Stream Charts.

Ban Does Not Curb Slots Streaming

According to the organization’s analysis, gambling has been one of the biggest categories behind that growth, or at the very least. Twitch saw “slots” come in as the second most popular non-gaming category.

Slots, which are the digital variations of land-based games, accounted for 287 million watched hours cumulatively, which is still an impressive number. This result comes after Twitch effectively banned referral codes to gambling sites.

While the report did not focus on the slots category, Twitch Metrics, an independent platform delving into the platform’s statistics had some answers. In December, the slots channel turned out to be the platform’s #14^th most popular channel.

The viewership in the month peaked at 80,867 viewers and the most-watched channels in the category remained people such as Trainwreckstv, Roshtein, ClassyBeef, DeuceAce, and VonDice. Trainwrecks, whose relationship with gambling changes all the time, is still the king of the category generating 5,576,515 hours watched in the last 30 days based on Twitch Metrics.

Roshtein generated another 2,833,989 based on the site’s data. Then, there is ClassyBeef which pulled in 965,788 viewer hours with DeuceAce and VonDice sharing 665,359 and 611,740 hours watched respectively.

Streams Disappearing, Not Everyone’s Playing by the Rules

Overall, the slots meta is strong on Twitch and it has proven one of the most powerful “non-gaming” categories, second only to “Just Chatting.” While the top channels and streamers are still on the platform and doing very well, some of the other channels have gone missing.

In the case of katchlow, a streamer that clocked in 69,849 hours watched, the channel is nowhere to be found on the platform, suggesting that Twitch may have suspended it. There are many such channels that have seemingly clocked big viewership numbers but have been removed or not seen live in weeks on the platform. This could be because they had been playing fast-and-loose with the platform’s rules, potentially pushing affiliate links.

As Twitch is probably looking to moderate this section of its streaming empire, Time2Play, a part of the Kafe Rocks Group, is offering an alternative to gamblers who are looking to stream gambling content.