In a rather surprising announcement, Twitch’s rival platform Mixer is slated to be shut down— with Microsoft aiming to partner with Facebook Gaming instead.
We’re guessing nobody saw this one coming in the midst of the battle of live streaming platforms!
Goodbye, Mixer
The Microsoft-owned live streaming service is scheduled to bid farewell on July 22, and will team up with Facebook Gaming to help partnered Mixer stars and streamers a new home.
In an official blog post, the Mixer team says:
“It became clear that the time needed to grow our own livestreaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences that Microsoft and Xbox want to deliver for gamers now.”
“So we’ve decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform.”
The platform had a leg up on Amazon because of its broad reach in the gaming ecosystem, from Xbox consoles to cloud streaming. This year, it was downloaded for over 3.4 million times by first-time users on the global app store and Google Play— a 23% decrease from its 2019 record.
Hard to beat
Despite having state-of-the-art live streaming technology and signing big gaming stars like Ninja and Shroud, Mixer remains to struggle in keeping up with big competitors like Twitch and YouTube Gaming.
The numbers didn’t seem too hopeful over time, too. In April, Mixer only garnered a total of 37 million hours watched compared to Twitch’s whopping 1.5 billion and YouTube’s 461 million.
The platform’s growth on its total hours watched only grew .2 percent between 2019 and 2020.
A new home
Mixer partners will have the choice to keep their partner status on Facebook Gaming, provided they move over to the platform.
Starting July 22, the URL “Mixer.com” will automatically redirect to “Fb.gg,” which is the official website of Facebook Gaming.
Project xCloud, Microsoft’s own cloud streaming service, is also stated to find a new home on Facebook Gaming. More details are yet to be disclosed in the next coming months.
In an interview with The Verge, Xbox head Phil Spencer says:
“It wasn’t as much about return on sell, it was about finding a partnership that was the best things for the community and streamers.”
“We think this is it, and it gives us a great place to launch more xCloud content and give gamers the ability to play from there.”
In the midst of the live streaming platform wars, Twitch remains supreme. Users choose to stay on the platform thanks to its unique emotes, in-game loot crates, convenient clips, and other features.
It even successfully branched outside of pure gaming content. Now, there exists plenty of other categories streamers can choose to create content on: such as cooking videos, arts and crafts, talk shows, Just Chatting, and more.
Regardless, Mixer will be a platform to remember for the next coming years— despite its amateur and sudden shutdown. Perhaps the timing just wasn’t right for it to flourish and prosper on its own.
