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Ninja’s Twitch Defection Is the Opening Shot in a Streaming War
Mixer’s shot across the bow is a big deal for the industry, but fairly insignificant to viewers
On Thursday, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, one of the world’s most prominent Fortnite players and Twitch’s most popular streamer, announced he was leaving the Amazon-owned platform to exclusively stream for the Microsoft-owned competitor Mixer in a move that shook up the streaming world.
This is a huge deal for the business of streaming, but probably meaningless for streaming viewers. Like sports broadcasting rights changing hands between the major networks, although the balance of power has shifted, fans will still tune in to watch the game on Sundays. Still, streaming platforms sit at a relatively new intersection of internet media and video game industries. That Microsoft — which, wouldn’t you know it, has a gaming console called the Xbox — just scooped up the internet’s most popular streamer suggests that console exclusivity could extend from more than games, but to personalities.
Over the last few years, watching people play video games online has become a big business. Between the four major players, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook Gaming, and Mixer, it’s estimated that viewers watched 3.7 billion hours of live footage in the second quarter of 2019 alone. Twitch, which launched in 2011 and was acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014, practically invented the format. Today, the service enjoys a near-monopoly on game streaming — Twitch accounts for 72% of all live video hours watched across the entire industry. By comparison, Mixer, which launched in 2016 as Beam and was snatched up and renamed by Microsoft later that year for an undisclosed amount, accounts for just 3%.
That market discrepancy is why Blevins jumping ship to Mixer is so unexpected. Until yesterday, he was Twitch’s most popular streamer with 14 million followers. (The next most popular streamer, Mike “Shroud” Grzesiek, commands a relatively small 6.7 million followers.) Last year, Blevins brought streaming into the public eye by convincing Drake to play a few rounds of Fortnite on stream, breaking Twitch’s concurrent viewer record and arguably cementing Blevins as the face of video game streaming. Whenever he plays, he…
