GME3: Friends of the Firm, SEC Goes Post-al, and Twitch Streamlines Staffing

Happy New Year to all our eager GME3 readers! In this year’s first edition, we’re covering some gaming news sources that we highly recommend in 2024, confusion surrounding the SEC’s announcement of a Bitcoin ETF, and the latest round of layoffs for streaming platform Twitch. Read the full stories below!

Gambling

Friends of the Firm

As 2024 begins to ramp up we’re looking at a slow news week in the Canadian gaming space.  Instead, we thought it would be a good idea to go over some of our favourite blogs, newsletters, and resources to stay up-to-date with gambling news in Canada and internationally. 

Gaming News Canada: It should be no surprise that Gaming News Canada is first on our list. Steve McAllister does a fantastic job rounding up the latest developments in Canada’s gaming industry every week and in various formats. If you aren’t much of a newsletter reader, we’d highly recommend you check out their weekly podcast, the Gaming News Canada Show.

Sharpr: Sharpr, run by Cody Luongo, provides coverage regarding esports, betting, and esports betting, including expert analysis and commentary, and reporting on breaking news in the industry. Cody also aims to provide some insight into Gen Z as a consumer base, so this is the place to look for more insight into the youth.

Earnings+More: Earnings+More differentiates itself from other gambling-centric blogs by focusing more on the financial aspects of the gaming industry. This includes earning reports from gaming operators of all sizes but also updates from regulated jurisdictions, marketing trends, and news hot from the stages of the conference circuit.

Straight to the Point: If you’re looking for more frequent updates on the global gaming industry, Steve Ruddock’s Straight to the Point is the newsletter for you! Steve does an excellent job of distilling the top stories of the day, Monday through Thursday every week. And, if you want some more in-depth info, subscribers gain access to a weekly article that expands on relevant topics that are impacting the gaming industry. 

The State of Online Gambling: Alun Bowden’s State of Online Gambling takes a more economics-based look at what’s going on in the igaming industry, such as analyzing the UK gambling market through the lens of chaos theory in his latest post. I’m not smart enough to understand what that means, but those of you who are more economically minded will enjoy!

Media

SEC Goes Post-al

Earlier this week the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seemingly took to X/Twitter to share that the long-awaited Bitcoin ETF had finally been approved. The keen-eyed among us might have thought it strange for a regulatory agency like the SEC to share official news over social media. The skeptics were later proved correct – the post turned out to be fake, the result of a compromised X account.

The post blew up, getting over 1 million views before being taken down by the real account holders. As a result of the exposure, BTC prices shot up to over CAD $64,000 before falling back down to around the $60,000 mark once the SEC announced that the information was false.

Luckily, we didn’t have to wait too much longer for the real news, as the SEC announced Wednesday afternoon that 11 BTC ETFs had been approved for trading. This includes ETFs offered by ARK Invest, BlackRock, VanEck, WisdomTree, Fidelity, Invesco, Franklin, Hashdex, and Valkyrie. Trading officially opened on Thursday morning, and BTC prices have been volatile as a result. Some ETFs have risen by 3% since the opening bell, and some have fallen that same amount.

There will be a lot of eyes – ours included – on the performance of these ETFs over the coming weeks. Will the option to publicly trade BTC bring a stronger sense of legitimacy to cryptocurrencies? We’ll have to wait and find out.

Entertainment

Twitch Streamlines Staffing

Amazon-owned Twitch, currently one of the leading live-streaming platforms in the world, has announced its plan to cut 35% of its staff, around 500 workers. These staffing cuts come as a result of general concern over financial losses at the company, as well as the departure of several top executives over the past few months, including the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Content Officer, and Chief Revenue Officer.

This isn’t the first time that Twitch has attempted to cut operating costs. 400 workers were laid off in March 2023, and, as we wrote about in a previous GME3, the platform has decided to cease operating in South Korea due to “prohibitively expensive” costs.

Despite these attempts to cut down on costs, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stated in his Wednesday morning blog post, that the organization behind the platform “is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.” Twitch supports 1.8 billion hours of live video content every month, a costly undertaking even with access to Amazon’s web infrastructure. And, despite the platform’s popularity among streamers and viewers alike, the business has remained unprofitable to this day.

While the business-oriented aspect of this platform has been dramatically trimmed down, Clancy has made efforts to improve relationships between Twitch and the streamers who create content for the site. During his tenure as CEO Twitch revamped its approach to sharing ad revenue with content creators. In 2023 alone, Twitch paid out over $1 billion to streamers.

Twitch is one of the largest streaming platforms in the world, hosting an impressive variety of content streamed live every day. Hopefully this round of cuts will be enough to bring the platform’s operating costs under control.