After Nickmercs reveals gambling is part of his new contract, xQc admits ‘everybody knows I am’ paid to gamble on-stream

pcgamer.com:

Twitch rival Kick, backed by co-founders of the Stake gambling platform, has spent a lot of money on streamers in 2023. The biggest deal by far was a reported $100 million contract for Canadian megastar xQc in January, but it recently signed up FaZe Clan co-owner and popular Call of Duty streamer Nick «Nickmercs» Kolcheff for an eight-figure sum.

On his first-ever Kick stream last week, Nickmercs had this to say: «The first question I've been seeing is like, 'Nick, are you gonna do gambling streams?' We’re gonna do some gambling for sure. It’s part of the contract, y'know.»

Confusingly, Kick's head of partnerships then denied Nickmercs' contract contained any gambling clause, but the devil's in the detail. Esports reporter Jake Lucky later clarified that we were dealing with some very fine definitions here: Nickmercs has a Stake contract as well as a Kick contract.

Nickmercs basically confirmed what many had suspected: that Stake is throwing money at streamers to promote gambling via Kick. Kick's status as one of the few streaming platforms to have built any audience in the face of Twitch is key here, because last year Twitch took action following community concerns about an increasing prevalence of gambling streams on the platform. Given Twitch's young audience in particular, the Amazon-owned streaming platform simply banned most of the big online gambling streams and washed its hands of a burgeoning problem.

Now Félix «xQc» Lengyel, arguably the most high-profile streamer-who-gambles and a self-confessed «addict», has admitted he is also being paid to gamble on-stream. In response to an audience member asking why he doesn't admit he's paid to gamble, xQc said: «Bro, I’ve never lied once about it before, what is up with