YouTube is overhauling its community guidelines to more strictly moderate gambling and violent gaming content. The massive Google-owned video platform will soon ban links to online skin casinos and other cosmetic gambling sites. It’ll also age-restrict videos featuring certain violent imagery like the kind you might see in any standard playthrough of blockbuster video games like the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
“Our policies are designed to evolve alongside the digital world,” YouTube wrote in a new blog post. “We’re making these updates to keep pace with new trends, like gambling with digital goods, and to more closely align our guidelines for mature content with industry standards.”
The changes go into effect on November 17. Here are the main bullet points:
- “We’re expanding our enforcement to now cover online gambling with additional items that have monetary value, including digital goods (e.g. video game skins, cosmetics and NFTs).”
- “Content that depicts, promotes, or facilitates social casino sites will now be age-restricted.”
- “We will age-restrict an additional small subset of video game content featuring realistic human characters that focuses on scenes of torture or scenes of mass violence against non-combatants.”
Video game gambling is spreading
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with the gambling side. The crackdown on “social casinos” means that even content that’s about gambling on stuff that’s not worth anything will be age-restricted under these new rules. In addition, gambling content that advertises third-party services for virtual items worth real money, like say, Counter-Strike skins, will now be banned or have to be approved by Google on a case-by-case basis.
While lots of games feature loot-box-style gambling, including some of the most popular ones like Dota 2 and Genshin Impact, games with tradeable items, like Counter-Strike, also have entirely separate, off-platform networks of gambling. One example is a website called Skin.Club that lets users battle against one another when opening loot boxes. It’s been advertised by websites like IGN and some of the videos made of the battles can rack up hundreds of thousands of views.
Why is YouTube cracking down on this stuff all of a sudden, even as popular games like Madden and EA Sports FC revolve around the viral highs and big spending that surrounds opening loot boxes online? One possibility is that it wants to limit any liability if lawsuits start popping up from parents angry that their kids’ YouTube histories are littered with thinly veiled gambling ads.
The GTA 6 video industrial complex
Now what about age-restricting graphic gaming content? YouTube says it will consider “several factors” when moderating this type of content. Those include how long the violence lasts, whether the video focuses on it, and whether the violence is happening to someone who looks real. I’d hate to be the person in charge of figuring any of that out.
Imagine someone streaming a Let’s Play of GTA 6, for example. Maybe one of the story missions has them in a shootout in a crowded mall. Bullets are flying and lots of innocent people get hit. Maybe a comical amount. The streamer is trying to get through the game but also goofing around and having fun. When it’s edited for future consumption, maybe the video producer is zooming in on random people getting hit at the intersection as they try to speed away for extra laughs.
It certainly sounds like this is the kind of thing that could get a video age-restricted. Why would that matter? Well, age-restricted videos get a ton fewer views. Fewer views means less revenue for the content creator. All of a sudden, some common-sense but vague guidelines from YouTube have completely upended what kind of gaming content gets produced for its platform.
Perhaps the most open to interpretation part of the new rules is the caveat around human-looking victims. What decides that? Do human-looking aliens count? What about blocky humans from a game like Minecraft or Roblox? Can you kill Sonic and Pikachu but not Mario and Goku (lots of YouTube gaming videos are actually just people modding other random stuff into Minecraft and GTA 5)?
Creators currently have just a couple of weeks to figure this all out. Even older content will be moderated under the new rules come mid-November. YouTube is encouraging them to go back through their channel histories and take a scalpel to anything that might run afoul of the new guidelines. Otherwise it will automatically be removed or age-restricted. I’m sure whatever AI process is used to do that won’t make any mistakes.
