Wherever James “PhantomLord” Varga seems to go, controversy no doubt follows. A couple of years ago, the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive streamer got into a bit of hot water after it was found out that he owned a site where players could gamble with skins from the game, making him a great amount of money in the process.
Twitch, the streaming service owned by Amazon, deleted his channel shortly thereafter, proclaiming that he was in breach of service over their rules. But apparently, Varga hasn’t forgotten this action, though, and, nearly two years after having his channel axed, he’s decided to take the streaming service to court.
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Varga filed a complaint with the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, noting that he’s still due monetary damages for having his channel banned.
The company had previously posted a set of rules back on July 14, 2016, noting that they were frowning on the idea of CS:GO based gambling broadcasts, as well as other gambling services – especially those being hyped on channels by popular streamers. Varga was especially guilty of this, as he managed to hype his CSGOShuffle site on his stream without disclosing any sort of connection to it. Varga eventually shut it down after the developers of Counter-Strike, Valve, threatened legal action.
But that hasn’t stopped Varga from being bitter to Twitch. According to this Dot Esports report, he feels that the site committed breach of contract, intentional interference with contractual relations, and intentional and negligent misrepresentation in removing him from the platform.
He also noted that he felt that gambling was permissible on the platform based on communications with his partnerships manager Jason “Opie” Babo – despite the fact that, again, they noted the rule changes just five days before they removed his channel. Varga did include conversations with Babo in the filing to try and give it more legal weight, but we’re not sure how effective it’ll be just yet.
Twitch hasn’t responded to the lawsuit yet, but it’s an interesting precedent, especially where Varga’s gambling past is concerned. We’ll see how this plays out in the weeks ahead, but it seems like he’s going to need more to win, particularly with Twitch making its rules very clear just days before Varga was removed.
