After ruining his good reputation through rigged CS:GO gambling and being banned from Twitch.TV, the streamer known for League of Legends is now suing the streaming platform.
James Varga, better known as “PhantomL0rd”, is now taking action against the livestreaming website “Twitch.TV”, where he once earned a lot of money. After it became known that the streamer promoted a CS:GO gambling website and concealed his partnership with it, his Twitch.TV channel was banned in 2016.
Now, nearly 600 days after this ban, Varga is suing Twitch.
Known for LoL and CS:GO, downfall due to manipulation
PhantomL0rd was a big deal between 2012 and 2016. He had over a million followers. About 16,000 of them were loyal subscribers who paid money monthly for his entertainment.
He initially gained a lot of attention for his League of Legends streams. He played champions like Karthus with then-unusual spell combinations (Teleport and Revive) and made a good name for himself in the community. He regularly entertained several thousand viewers on Twitch.
After a few years, Varga lost interest in LoL and started looking for other games. At that time, CS:GO streams were popular on Twitch.
However, viewers enjoyed not only watching gameplay of the shooter. They wanted to see streamers putting their money into loot boxes and watched them open several hundred cases within a streaming session.
In these loot boxes from CS:GO, there are weapon skins. Some are boring and occur frequently. For others, you pay more than a thousand dollars on the digital market.
The gambling with CS:GO skins
Many noticed this “skin boom” and wanted to take advantage of it. So-called “gambling websites” allowed players to throw one or more skins into a “pot”. A mix of chance and calculated winning odds then determined which player would receive all the skins thrown into the pot: pure gambling.
Sometimes values of over 10,000 dollars would change hands.
It’s clear that players watched these streams. Seeing whether their favorite streamer lost or won large sums while gambling was entertaining for many viewers.
PhantomL0rd against Twitch.TV – The aftermath of the ban
On July 19, 2016, Varga’s Twitch channel was deleted after reports claimed that Varga owned a website for CS:GO skin gambling involving real money. According to leaked chat logs, Varga manipulated certain bets so that they would turn out in his favor and he would receive the skins wagered.
In his streams, PhantomL0rd promoted the website CSGOShuffle without indicating that he had a relationship with the site. This led viewers to believe that his winnings on the site were the result of gaming chance and not of a manipulated system.
Valve eventually ensured that the CSGOShuffle website had to be closed down.
The negative attention surrounding CS:GO gambling also reached the livestreaming provider Twitch.TV. There, the terms of service were revised, making it clear that streamers could not broadcast content that violated the terms of service of third-party providers. Shortly before that, Valve had announced that using the trading system of Steam on such gambling websites violated Steam’s terms of service.
This is how Twitch and Valve ended this type of CS:GO gambling.
What is Varga’s lawsuit based on?
On February 14, 2018, James Varga filed a lawsuit against Twitch Interactive Inc in the San Francisco County Superior Court. The lawsuit claims that Twitch has caused financial damages to the streamer due to the ban in 2016.
In the lawsuit, Varga states that Twitch terminated the contract with him without ever providing a proper explanation as to why his channel was removed. In the agreement that Twitch and Varga made in 2015, it supposedly stated: If Twitch wanted to terminate the contract, Varga had to receive a written explanation. According to the lawsuit, this never happened.
“Twitch only made vague and ever-changing claims about what rules were violated,” the lawsuit states.
Furthermore, the court documents state that Varga allegedly had permission to stream exactly the content for which he was ultimately banned. PhantomL0rd apparently operated in gray areas. An official from Twitch.TV wrote to Varga at the time about this issue: “Do what you think is right. Honestly, though, I wouldn’t risk it.”
Twitch informed Varga that his ban would be indefinite but did not explain which violation ultimately led to it, Varga says. Only in January 2017 did Twitch explain to him that he was amassing false subscribers (bots), which violated Twitch.TV’s terms of service.
With the lawsuit, the streamer is therefore seeking some form of damages justified by his ban. He alleges that the misrepresentation of his character and the inability to continue earning an income through livestreaming (which was his full-time job) caused irreparable damage.
You can view the complete lawsuit on the Unicourt website.
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