Last year, Twitch returned to live, in-person events in San Diego and Amsterdam. The convention’s health policy sparked controversy after Twitch announced it would not require masks for either event. After considerable social media backlash, Twitch reversed its decision and mandated masks, but only at TwitchCon San Diego. San Diego then continued to make news a streamer broke her back after falling off a mechanical bull at TwitchCon’s famous (now infamous) foam pit. This can only be a temporary change of location. There’s a chance Twitch will return to San Diego as it has in the past, returning to the city in 2019 after hosting events in San Jose and Long Beach, California.

Keeping the US portion of the event in Las Vegas seems like an interesting choice, especially after Twitch banned certain forms of gambling streams from the platform. Despite the ban that led a prominent gambling creator to stream on a rival site connected to Stake.com, one of the explicitly banned gambling websites, gambling streams are still popular on Twitch. And since TwitchCon live streaming is a popular pastime for the streamers in attendance, I have no doubt that some of them will be filming themselves gambling. I wonder if that could fail Twitch’s ban. I think we will know in October.