Ludwig criticizes potential Twitch competitor Kick: ‘It just seems a bit fishy’

A new potential Twitch competitor entered the fray yesterday with Trainwreck announcing that he’ll be working with the streaming platform Kick. But as a savant of the industry, Ludwig thinks the startup “might be a little bit suspicious.”

During a day full of reactions and revelations that included internet sleuths finding out that online casino Stake.com owner Edward Craven was also invested in Kick, Ludwig tried to make sense of everything during a video uploaded to his Mogul Mail YouTube channel.

In Train’s statement, he mentioned that Kick would be able to achieve creator-friendly revenue splits for subscriptions by selling advertisements on the website. But Ludwig was quick to note that Twitch is no slouch when it comes to seeking money from advertisers. 

“The fact of the matter is that’s also what Twitch is trying to do,” he said. “That is in part why Twitch removes things like gambling or the hot tub meta or they ban so much. It’s because they need to be able to cater to advertisers.”

Meanwhile, Ludwig enlisted the help of his full-time software developer Ottomated to look into whether or not Kick was ripping off Twitch’s intellectual property after many people pointed out how similar the site looks compared to the established platform. Otto was able to confirm that the website was not directly ripping code from Twitch despite having a suspiciously similar aesthetic.

With the platform largely having gambling content on it, Ludwig hypothesized that the involvement of a Stake owner as an investor meant that perhaps this platform was Stake’s way of finding a new outlet for promotional gambling content following Twitch’s ban on unlicensed gambling content.

“This is a loss leader for Stake.com to actually be able to advertise their business that gets around the ban on the mainstream platforms like Twitch and YouTube,” he said.

In a vacuum, Ludwig didn’t seem to find that business plan morally abhorrent, but he expressed that he found it problematic that Train and Stake weren’t upfront and transparent about everything from the get-go.

“In my mind, I think it’s really bad that Train didn’t disclose that this was a Stake.com-owned website,” he said. “Not only did he not disclose it, it felt like they were kind of trying to hide it as well. … It just seems a bit fishy. … Sure, be operated and owned by Stake.com, but be honest about it too. You still could feasibly provide value to creators who aren’t interested in gambling content because they’d get such a good cut because you’re getting the blood money from all the gambling casino users. … But they should know going in that it’s not because you’re going to create a successful business that’s going to sell to advertisers a year from now.”

In conclusion, Ludwig didn’t have overly optimistic prospects for Kick. While he admittedly harps on the downfall of Twitch regularly, Ludwig also acknowledged that the platform has such a vice grip on the market right now that competing with it will be difficult.

After adding in the bad publicity Kick has gotten for not being transparent and the fact he believes it could very well just be a marketing outlet for Stake, Ludwig’s final assertion is one summarized by irrelevance.

“The website in six months will probably either disappear or be flooded with gambling streamers and should only be touched by people who want to lose all of their money or live vicariously through people who are losing all of their fake money because all of it’s sponsored anyway,” he said.