That’s a bit sudden. I feel sorry for Ninja … he can’t re-sign with Twitch. I guess Microsoft didn’t understand the whole “game streaming” ecosystem.
Taken from Forbes … Truly wild news in the video game streaming world today as after a troubled lifespan, Microsoft is shuttering Mixer, its streaming service which attempted to compete with Twitch by stealing away big-name creators with exclusivity contracts, only to see almost no growth in a medium that has otherwise been exploding.
Microsoft has announced today that Mixer is dead and now its livestreaming services are being transformed into a new partnership with Facebook Gaming, which has seen rather explosive growth in the past year and during quarantine (though you know what they say about Facebook video metrics). Existing Mixer pages will be turned into Facebook Gaming pages.
The exception, however, is that the exclusive “big names” that Mixer bought out from under Twitch have now been released from their contracts. While reports say that Facebook did try to retain names like Ninja and Shroud, who were paid millions, if not tens of millions, to make the switch, they didn’t come to an arrangement (despite allegedly double the original offers), and yet they will still get the full payment for their old contracts, so this could not have worked out better for them. While it hasn’t been announced, it stands to reason that they will likely return to their original homes at Twitch, unless say, YouTube Gaming snaps them up. But the early gold rush of buying up creators to promote growth does not seem to have panned out.
Read the rest of the article at Forbes.