Microsoft is shutting down Mixer and partnering with Facebook Gaming
theverge.com
theverge.com
I think the problem with video, and the monopolies it continues to create, is the massive expense of data transfer. I'm guessing Mixer had hundreds/thousands of streamers active at any given time. I assume this was a massive cost and the revenue to support it (even ignoring their deals with streamers like Ninja/Shroud) just wasn't there.
It makes me doubt the profitability of Twitch, although you can be sure they are breathing a sigh of relief today.
They pumped millions and millions into exclusivity deals with streamers like Ninja and Shroud, only saw small growth and then completely stalled.
Even during the recent lockdowns they remained almost flat, while others had big viewership spikes.
At some point you just have to call it quits.
The new competition besides Twitch is FB Gaming and YouTube, which can leverage existing platforms with a huge userbase.
An isolated platform that offers no value over Twitch has no chance in this environment.
It definitely did not go well for them, though; the community were not fans and they promptly went back to Twitch after their year was up. They had to have paid a pretty penny to get that deal inked!
2 Remember FarmVille or Plants vs Zombies?
I don't see how Farmville is relevant. Mobile games and Twitch streams don't see to be anything alike.
Letting streamers utilize their existing social network is a potential game change for early channel growth.
Exactly. FB Gaming seems to be very focused on Mobile Games and other typical Facebook-Games (makes sense), not so much on Console and PC-Games.
Considering the culture of users it also makes sense. Facebook is more for casual games, who play something on the side, but don't give much for the whole culture, dedication and stuff. Twitch is more embracing the whole core-gamer-culture and youth, making it quite hard to be accessable for everyone else.
They had value in being able to stream to your friends with .2 seconds of latency instead of 4 seconds of latency.
But Discord has moved in on that territory.
Does anyone here know how video platforms like Twitch managed to get started considering how expensive cloud data transfer pricing is? The steam bandwidth is considerably higher then video bandwidth (twitch uses a bitrate at around 8000k while YouTube has 3414k for comparable 1080p60fps videos). They also cannot take advantage of edge delivery expect for very large streamers because viewers expect a latency of 3secs or lower to their favorite stream.
I am really curious if anyone here knows how they managed to get started? They probably couldn't take advantage of super low bandwidth prices until recently because they were too small but had very expensive requirements (a lot of streamers only streaming to a very limited amount of people with high quality while also having a few very very large streamers stream to a huge amount of viewers and all of that in real time).
> It makes me doubt the profitability of Twitch, although you can be sure they are breathing a sigh of relief today.
I think twitch is highly profitable these days. Streamers have a considerable amount of subscribers, who pay a monthly fee of $5 (or sometimes even more) and stay for long durations. Twitch takes a 30-50% cut (lower depending on how big the streamer is and if twitch likes the streamer). Even streamers who average less then 1,000 concurrent viewers sometimes have between 100-500 subs.
And they have also created bits, which is a virtual currency viewers can use to tip their favorite streamers and twitch takes a similar cut (and they only let you but it in bulk beforehand to make it less transparent on how much you actually spent on them, similar to many mobile games in-app purchase model). And they play ads before streams (and during streams if they streamer decides to play them for a small cut), they also heavily advertise amazon prime (twitch streams constantly say hey you can use amazon prime to subscribe to me for free), they have premium users and probably even more monetization techniques.
Just to put it in context, game streaming was picking up steam on Justin.TV before Instagram even launched. The juggernaut that Twitch is now was just inevitable.
As a former Counter-Strike 1.6 player in a decent level I do remember the transition from watching eSports on HLTV and other in-game broadcast solutions to watching on Justin.TV or UStream.
I think the major turning point was around 2011-2012 and my days of competitive gaming were way behind me at that point so being able to watch pros through a live videostream was quite exciting, now it's just a given but it's been brewing for the past 10-15 years.
Don't use amazon, mostly.
If you're really small, there are lots of servers for rent that have gigabit+ connections at reasonable prices.
Once you're in the tens to hundreds of gigabits per second, you can get cheap connections in datacenters. If you were starting twitch today, you could get some $1500 10gig internet connections. Then one server can support 1500 viewers, with an average of 1000, and cost only about a fifth of a cent per viewer-hour for bandwidth. Not too hard to reach with an ad break, and a subscriber pays you much more than they cost.
Bandwidth gets more expensive as you go back in the years, but AWS has never been a good deal, and twitch had lower bitrates too.
To underscore: the bandwidth is completely free.
A very high quality stream at the start of Twitch was 2500 kbps. Viewership numbers were much smaller. This meant that bandwidth costs were significantly lower.
Back then ad revenue was much higher per user. Ad block wasn't common and I'm pretty sure ads paid more. This essentially allowed Twitch (and YouTube) to grow to become big enough.
Streaming sites before Twitch/JustinTV were even lower video quality. Eg livestream. We're talking about 480p looking good in comparison. Even the audio quality on those was poor.
Twitch actually had a great competitor in own3d.tv, but they had a lot of trouble paying out to the streamers. That eventually sank them.
In the announcement[2] they mentioned:
> We are well aware that many dedicated Twitch viewers use software that bypasses ads, and the rollout of this technology will reduce the efficacy of such software. As a company we are agnostic when it comes to the use of this software. You are free to use it, or not, as you see fit.
I suspect that either advertisers or streamers aren't using SureStream or that it's quite resource expensive to "weave" ads into the source stream so Twitch simply isn't using it when the cost of doing so is more than it generates in ad revenue.
[1]: https://twitchadvertising.tv/ad-products/surestream/
[2]: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2016/11/02/introducing-sure-stream...
Yup, to expand on that I had a chance to chat with someone at Justin.tv and they said a thirty second ad pays a lot more than the cost of serving video for an hour. iirc this was around 2009 or 2010?
Also, iirc even through 2014, my friends who played League of Legends (lol) used to watch stream on VLC instead of directly on the website on Twitch. The consensus was for lol, 720p60 was preferable to 1080p30.
I don't think Twitch got where it got because of technical prowess. If I had to guess, it was just lucky being first. It would be interesting to hear stories from the people at YouTube. Why did it take them so long to add live streaming?
Justin.tv/Twitch.tv wasn't first though. Livestream and Ustream, for instance, were relevant before Justin.tv. It's just that they messed up along the way and people always migrated to the next service. When people did so from Ustream to Justin.tv, the latter never really did and as such, people never really left. However, they had a competitor in the form of own3d.tv for a good amount of time....but own3d.tv lost the holding-the-breath battle, as I don't think they really had financial backing unlike Twitch.tv then. If any larger company had paid attention back then (around 2012), the international streaming space might have looked different.
Where this matters is that sometimes consumers will automatically assume bitrate=quality (especially in audio), and then claim one audio service has better quality than other just because they use a higher bitrate.
Amazon doesn't charge its internal departments what it charges you.
1. See a market that's doing really well that you didn't enter until 5+ years too late and the market is quite established.
2. Play catch up by paying a bunch of 'producers', streams/development houses, to come on board yet still doing the same thing everyone else does with zero base.
3. Exit said market because the money being pumped in is 100x or 1000x worse than the returns.
MSFT's other strategy, buy and then operate usually pans out better for them.
A number of popular gaming stream helpers, namely Harris Heller from Alpha Gaming [0], have kept streamers away from Mixer to focus on Twitch and hosting VOD/highlights on YouTube in order to best grow a community.
Facebook is a large enough platform that this might cause some trouble for Twitch, but we'll see. I think the gaming community is deeply seated around Twitch/YT. Since Facebook has already lost tons of younger users, and rejects anonymity, and doesn't have dark mode, I don't think this will turn out very good for Facebook.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCATWC1JSlhzmYeDbjnS8WwA/sea...
"The Youth" are on twitch to burn mom or dad's free amazon prime sub, per month.. another reason twitches numbers are "high" compared to others.
Xbox could have spent that shroud and ninja money on free subs for Xbox gold holders.. and deliver more value, like the bezos-twitch prime sub shell game
Also, it seems like FB Gaming numbers are really taking off, partly due to signing some big names from Twitch. [1]
Lastly, they actually do support gamertags, but I’m iffy on the anonymity concept being a negative here. Twitch has a problem with some toxic chats, users making throwaway accounts to get around ban, etc. If I were a streamer, this would be a great alternative for me to build a community with less overhead in managing the toxic parts.
All in all, it doesn’t have to be a “winner-take-all”; it’s nice to have some healthy competition in the market, even if the only folks that can do it are the biggest players (Amazon / Google / Facebook.) I’m just _really_ surprised that Microsoft couldn’t make Mixer work despite the tight Xbox integrations.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/01/09/face...
EDIT: grammar / spelling, as typing on a phone in 2020 is still tough
How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions.
(And, this being the modern Internet: How many of those new DAUs are real people?)
I agree, but it's not that surprising given how strongly Facebook has dominated the North American market. In North America DAUs are at 253 million [1]; if you assume that the population of all NA is ~369 million [2], you virtually have tapped the keg, so to speak.
Growth rates are going to decline once you hit market saturation like that, which has nothing to do with Product or user trends - just straight macro trends.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/popu....
I'm sure it might be possible to figure out which facebook real name made and owns that page. But at face value I was able to stream and comment under my alternate persona. namrog84. Without having to make a new Facebook account. They have a drop down in streamer chat if you want to use your real name or a name of a page.
With that said, I'm very hesitant of fb gaming streaming and this is my first ever time really looking at it.
The first LPT I taught me daughters when they started using the internet is that on the internet, you are a super hero - no one should know your real name.
I don't have children, and as a 20-something I know the struggle and seeming impossibility of avoiding FB products, but I try to avoid pouring my whole identity into them. It's rough when the social culture is rapidly shifting to "unless you put everything online you're not worth my time" or makes you one of those "privacy nuts."
Once you start connecting, you unmask yourself quite easily - many have tried creating spare accounts (even with VPNs and separate browser contexts) and have quite quickly been shown their exist friend set as "recommendations by FB".
Look at all the dumb things people say with their real names on Twitter as well.
Discussion is civil when you actually cultivate civil discussion, not when you force people to use real names.
I can see FB/MS tapping into deep pockets to offer some top streamers a great deal to move platforms. If they get enough of them to move and the service is stable, intuitive and fun to be on then I can see FB doing well.
FB knows how to build communities, they know how to build engaging content and how to run that type of business. I would bet on them figuring out how to leverage their subject matter expertise on that side house to bring a very good product offering in this new vertical.
There’s an ecosystem there that they can tap into as well, marketplace, pages, etc that if they can pull it off, could make it a very lucrative all-in-one solution for the streamers.
There is absolutely _zero_ chance of younger demographics moving to facebook. I'm in my 20s and know many gamers in their 20s/teens and we all avoid facebook like the plague. There's no chance.
We've seen it again and again and again-- you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer. All either outright failed or stole at best a tiny fraction of market share.
There's so many examples of corporations trying and failing at this strategy that it's just a comic act by now.
You absolutely CAN steal a userbase if the quality of your product is sufficiently better than the existing alternative. The problem with Mixer is that the only real advantage they had was latency, and that's not a big enough reason to draw people to the platform.
Facebook's current problem is that they want to use their existing network and one of the primary features of a gaming platform is anonymity. 99% of the streamers on twitch can't be identified by anything but their usernames, and that's the way they like it. Facebook is antithetical to that experience.
Google was made by two grad students who came up with a better way of searching. They invented a superior product and it took off on its own merits.
Gmail was largely created by one person helming the project on his own, and again it took off because it was VASTLY better than existing options. I was a Gmail beta user-- I remember! It wasn't even close.
Facebook, again-- not a corporation throwing a ton of money at something. It took off on its own, exactly as depicted in The Social Network. It was made by a handful of college students and people simply loved using it in the beginning.
Given your examples, you see to have misunderstood me as arguing that a successful product can never be replaced or lose its dominance. Of course I am not saying that, that would be crazy. I am saying a corporation or any other entity with a lot of money cannot replace a successful product using that money. They can only do it by actually coming up with a better solution to the problem, and that almost never happens-- they simply aren't able to do such a thing in most cases.
Instead they deliver hollow, branded imitations like the many examples I named, and they fail.
Personally I hope for a good decentralized (actually decentralized, not d.live) streaming network to take off.
My point was along the lines of, p2p streaming is feasible with current infrastructure because it already works under those less than ideal conditions
Look at instagram stories?
You realize your anecdotal circle of friends is really not relevant in the grand scheme of things?
For product fit, the experiences and feedback from your target audience are _extremely_ "relevant in the grand scheme of things." If your target audience is saying "I literally don't know anyone who would want to use this," yeah, that's relevant.
Unless you're aiming to imply that me and my friend group and greater gaming community are the exception and in fact the majority of young people use facebook, in which case....lol.
My "anecdotal experience" is interacting with dozens of gaming communities which mysteriously all link to subreddits and discords and twitches and never, ever a facebook group. That's not very anecdotal when these are communities of tens and hundreds of thousands of people.
This is still wrong; anecdotal data is what motivates studies in the first place.
What anecdotal data isn't is a conclusion.
Have you done a statistically relevant survey of what the “majority of young people do”?
As a reference, if you go to r/cscareerquestions you would swear that no other company exists for graduating software engineers but the big 5 tech companies and if you don’t spend every minute “learning LeetCode to work for a FAANG” your life is over and you might as well kill yourself.
They are all on Instagram though...
I think there's an under-reporting problem here, where there's a stigma associated with using Facebook (it's for old people!) yet younger people still use it a lot. Note that this doesn't bode well for launching a service aimed at people in their 20s. Even though they're the most common demographic, they might not want their peer group to know they're using it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about...
I would have expected a big rise around 18-22 because a lot of college / University and other interest group activity is there, and there are more varied friend groups and family to keep up with.
The 4th survey for 13-17 year olds with 50% is somewhat surprising for me though.
The average gamer is 34 years old 70% of gamers are age 18 or older
Considering FB has between 2.5 and 3 billion users. FB has much more chances of success considering its size, its user base, its built in advertising platform, its global reach, etc. Streaming and gaming isn't just about 12-18 year old gamers. If you're thinking monetization, there's not a whole lot to gain there for the majority of steamers. Not a whole lot of 12 year olds can support streamers financially. So sure, maybe it won't be the platform of choice for the 16 year olds, but doesn't mean it can't be dwarfed in size by the rest of the demographics who are also into gaming.
Don't forget, gamers of yesterday who started with the earliest consoles or who got on board anywhere between atari, NES, SNES, Sega, PS1, PS2, or PC gamers, are still gamers today.
Yes, these are anecdotes. If you have references that show Facebook is popular with young demographics I'd love to see links and discuss them.
Otherwise these anecdotal data points are useful. While not representative, it gives some ideas about mindset.
Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.
Except Facebook did that. Rumors go Facebook offered them double their Deal from Mixer, but they declined. Though, others did take it. Facebook is bar far not as worse as Mixer for a streamer. If you have the matching games, you can be happy there.
Gaming is the most profitable and highest revenue part of the entertainment industry, and it's not even especially close.
Ninja's had 4.4 million viewers of a single stream on Mixer. That's just one guy in a chair with an almost zero content cost.
$30 Million doesn't seem that crazy compared to the total cost to produce a year's worth of prime-time content.
[1] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/351645/prime-....
[2]
The current rumor is that FB offered to double the Mixer contracts for Shroud and Ninja as well, and that both turned them down. Not sure how accurate said rumors are.
This is indeed usually the strategy.
What people seem to forget though, is that Mixer is not the first streaming competitor that thought of the idea of "just pay streamers a bunch of money, and hope the viewers follow".
Although, in some sense, this does work, there is a long graveyard of failed attempts.
It is a bit of a winners curse. A platform can always just pay people a bunch of money to join their platform. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually making back the money that you spent on those creators.
And the reality is that none of the attempts to just buy out streamers, by vast over paying for them, has ever worked, for the long term.
Eventually the money spigots dry up, and the people spending the money start to wonder when they are actually going to make back on their investment (hint: the answer is never).
If you wanted to pay streamers to defect to your platform, then don't cheap out and try to pay a few of them.
Pay all of them. As much as it takes. And blacklist the ones who turn down your initial offers.
WCW vs WWF is illustrative.
You can't win while a rival platform remains viable. And they remain viable as long as they can fund themselves.
So either you play to drive your opponent out of business, or don't play at all.
The problem, though, is in markets where there are more than two participants.
What happens when Mixer does this strategy, as well as Facebook gaming, as well as youtube gaming? Answer: the costs shoot up into the stratephere, and all of them go bankrupt.
It is kind of like a game of chicken. Massively overbidding to buy out the entire market only works if there aren't other people out there who are willing to meet you at the same level of irrationality, and burn the whole thing to the ground, along with you.
IMO, the only real workable strategy, similar to this, would be if those are smaller platforms, agree to do some sort of team up (which is sorta what is happening with FB gaming and mixer), so that the irrational actors don't all lose the game of chicken.
I don't understand why Mixer, after failing to penetrate the game streaming market - didn't pivot to a tech/coder oriented streaming service. It would have better integrated with Microsoft's other products (GitHub, Teams, etc), and trivialized finding marketing/ad-fill partners.
Twitch has a 'science & technology' channel grouping which is nice, but there's a demographic mismatch and thus it has less than 10k viewers on average. This niche would have been a shoe-in for a Microsoft service.
I also wonder what would have happened in a parallel universe where Beam wasn't acquired by Microsoft.
Microsoft did admit there is a smarter pivot on the tech side, at least. Mixer's claim to fame over Twitch et al was lower latency streaming and Microsoft admitted they are already working to move the technical teams at Mixer to work on Teams.
> I also wonder what would have happened in a parallel universe where Beam wasn't acquired by Microsoft.
Best guess: something very similar. Beam would likely have also failed to break much of a second place against entrenched competitor Twitch and likely failed to find a solution to the network effects battles when Facebook Gaming or YouTube gaming started up. Best case for them would likely have been an acquihire by Facebook or YouTube rather than Microsoft in that scenario where Microsoft didn't acquire them.
Because this doesn't make money, has a very low market and doesn't need all the expensive technology they invested into.
> Twitch has a 'science & technology' channel grouping which is nice
Exactly, and it sucks. I'm a dev, I occasionally watch there, but it's just not very good. Technology is just not good content for this medium. And a good streamer has the kind of personality which is hard to find with technology-affine people.
> but there's a demographic mismatch
Not true. There are many coders and people working in IT on twitch. They probably even make the biggest group outside of gamers.
Though, it's also true that Twitch does not sell this category well. There are many stuff outside of gaming which could be sold better. Creative-Categories have this problem too.
Ninja & Shroud weren't enough to tip the scales and Mixer had zero traction. Of course they will be fine, but it sucks for the smaller streamers that hitched their wagons to Mixer and are now left to hold the proverbial bag. Even more telling is that Microsoft is burying this news under WWDC20, probably embarrassed about the entire snafu.
For me as a viewer, an easy example is that taking clips of streams is relatively new to Mixer, and you can't even sort/filter them. Clips helped build a lot of Twitch streamers' popularity by making things bite-sized and shareable.
Facebook Gaming had the room. So did Discord, and with the Corona-Lockdowns also Zoom and other private Video-Conferencing-Services (though they are not exactly focused on public streaming). Mixer just never found their niche and strength, they sucked and failed because they tried to be another Twitch, instead of aiming to be their own.
- FTL protocol, a streaming protocol based on UDP which had sub 1 second delay times, far far superior to what Twitch is capable of.
- User interaction, I was able to quite quickly set up buttons on my page that let my stream viewers control the RGB lighting in my room in interesting ways, and it was a lot of fun for me as a streamer to get that realtime interaction with my viewers
Discord though - they announced streaming and I thought it was ridiculous, but they've won me over. Among a friend group, where joining the stream also implies joining the voice chat, I find myself being drawn in when someone is streaming. It's great for: waiting for a round to end before you can join the group, reviewing replays as a group, "hey check out this cool thing", just seeing what's up with a game a few people are trying out, or (especially in post-covid19 world) just hanging out when you don't/can't (eg, eating) play at the moment but want some socialization. Combined with video chat and it makes a good platform for socially distant jackbox games - it just works compared to other video chats which seem optimized for slide shows and fail at streaming a game smoothly with audio.
I don't use/watch any of these platforms but I heard the delay is a feature of Twitch to prevent people from "screen peeking" players when they play online.
Then one can freely switch between the live scene and the delayed scene. Simple.
They have extra options for artificial delay if you need it.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
This is a market share growth opportunity that comes around very infrequently
Twitch is already over 70% of the streaming market. Let's say that both of them go to YouTube. Let's also say that Ninja and Shroud accounted for all of Mixer's market share..
That would give YouTube roughly 20% of the market, up from about 17%. Twitch is still 70% of the market.
Twitch should be looking for ways to make it easier for streamers to stream and get noticed. Find the next Ninja.
It's actually a pretty interesting economic / business model case study: they're basically crowdsourcing which streamers they subsidize while simultaneously offering a cross-promotional perk to an existing customer base.
Will most of them probably move to Twitch anyway? Yes. Will Twitch be losing money in the short-term by giving away value here? Probably. But in the long-term having these ex-Mixer folks happy and feeling welcomed will have positive impact on their fans, communities, and gaming as a whole. Not to mention the revenue potential these folks could bring.
And I'm not saying the value of acquiring them is zero. I'm saying the value of acquiring them may not be worth it.
Twitch could be a lot worse, and they'll probably get a lot worse now losing their only decent competition. The general murmur around the Twitch exclusivity deals was that they 10x'd in value and quantity after Microsoft put a price on Ninja. Unless YouTube gets serious, the same level of serious that Twitch and Mixer were, Twitch has no reason to add value to these streamers. The streamers wont leave; they can't.
And we all know YouTube won't do the right thing by their content creators, because they already don't.
This is a very dark day for content creators. Mixer failed, but it at least represented literally the only threat on Twitch's radar; there was always the question of "well what if Mixer blows up" guiding biz-dev at Twitch. Unless streamers band together and unionize, Amazon is going to crush them.
Gamers don’t want Facebook. They don’t want TV. Gamers want games.
Yeah, the fact that the PS2 could play DVDs had absolutely nothing to do with its tremendous success.
FB didn't even need to do anything, just their existence and networking abilities is enough to make alternatives unviable.
I do wonder what we will do in the long term as most places are centralized. Google and Apple for a mobile OS, FB (or FB properties) for social networking, there's Twitch for streaming, YouTube for video hosting.
These days, the chances of competition are (IMO) impossible due to the sheer size and influence (and power) of these mega giants.
When people take issue with monopolies, they are not asking for a company like MS to break that up. They are asking for smaller, independent players.
Youtube Gaming is also growing extremely fast since they have rolled out their new creative suite.
https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/streamlabs-newzoo-q4-ye....
Facebook Gaming hardly has any market share so I don't understand why you are saying their existence and networking abilities is enough to make alternativeS unviable. The streaming industry seems to be one of the most competitive markets out there.
facebook gaming is catching up really fast. it went from 'hardly any market share' to 11% of hours watched.
They did a decent job of copying the Twitch UI to make the transition familiar, but then had a number of unnecessary friction points that I'm sure drove folks away. As an example with my own experience: I was a somewhat regular Shroud viewer on Twitch. When he had his first Mixer stream I tuned in, only to find out that A) his overlay notifications hadn't been integrated and B) I couldn't even minimize the chat pane of the viewer without signing up for a Mixer account, which was an onerous process.
Not having a large streamers overlay integrations working prior to his debut stream tells me that MS does not understand how critically important community engagement is in live streaming.
Forcing me to sign up just to be able to control the viewer UI drove me away and removed any chance of me returning and finding organic reasons to sign up for Mixer.
That was the one and only time I watched Shroud after his move.
>“It’s up to them and their priorities,” says Vivek Sharma, the head of Facebook Gaming, meaning the platform isn’t actively pursuing exclusive agreements with any of Mixer’s biggest names.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21298963/ninja-shroud-mix...
Now that these streamers have an idea how much engagement and money they'll be losing from switching platforms, they'll probably demand more from FB Gaming for an exclusivity contract. I haven't heard people talk about Mixer being a better platform or experience for streaming, so I'm not sure what FB gets out of this considering Mixer's talent was its most valuable asset.
Obviously not comparable for a variety of reasons (viewer quality, syndication, youtube clips) but that show was spending 100+ million on just the main cast.
He's the face of gaming for all the non-gamers right now.
Shroud is just a very good gamer and has a big audience, he's not that marketable compared but still worth a decent penny I guess. He's probably considered the best FPS streamer out there whenever a new game comes out. He's the go to for many.
Their culture though... Before Shroud and Ninja joined, there were rules that you couldn't tell people your age. They had rules on how wide your shirt straps could be, and just generally seemed like if you had any opinions on other people, you would be chastised. They valued explicit political correctness, but that's not so good when you're making a place designed for just chilling and hanging out... At least, not when you're trying to grow.
Another way to word it is that the online gaming community is extremely toxic and you have to accept a decent chunk of that toxicity to grow a community in the gaming space.
Put in another way: each stream is an individual community. By making such explicit rules, they are policing culture and suppressing certain identities. That is counter to the environment needed for growth.
If a stream and its viewers is a community, then on Mixer you didn't really have the chance to make that community "yours" -- rather, you had to be what Mixer wanted you to be, which is some made-up archetype of the advertiser-friendly hip gamer who captures that coveted market segment without saying anything even remotely controversial.
This sounds like FUD. The streamer controls the video encode, not the platform. Also Twitch has had <1s latency streaming for more than a year.
"A typical Microsoft" I guess?
Big pay day for Ninja & Shroud though if they're really just free to join Twitch again, their returns will be huge.
Since the communication direct is still mostly one way, you can e.g. aggregate all the chats from multiple platforms into a single one, and treat it like you would right now. Rocketbeans.tv, a German television-like streaming station that I watch a lot has a "superchat"[0] that does just that (which I think they built in-house), and it works really well. From a quick search, it looks like Restream.io also provides such a tool.
Thinking there was some break clauses in Ninja and Shroud’s contracts that incentivised MS’s early exit.
Some 2019 streaming numbers from pre-Corona era which I found interesting at that time. Mixer declined in hours watched after summer of 2019. Also interesting to see that Facebook "Gaming"'s top games only feature mobile games. Being a gamer myself I therefore find it difficult to really view them as a serious competitor to the game streaming market of YouTube and Twitch. Maybe this will change with Mixer's user base.
The only real alternative to Twitch is streaming live on YouTube. Not a competitor, but an alternative. And that's only because they have a massive viewership already. A lot of those probably never heard about Mixer or even Twitch at all.
You'd think it's the same with Facebook, but that's like a different target audience. You don't usually go to Facebook to binge videos. Just like it would make no sense to stream live on Twitter.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ninja-shroud-could-ret...
> Ninja and Shroud are now free agents
Then an Ad on Twitch in front of 100k viewers is different than an Ad on Mixer (not really sure if they have Ads on Mixer). With Ninja's viewership on Twitch 60 second Ad, can probably bring him more than $10k. Not sure if he had used Ads though (may streamers chose not to use them).
I can see Facebook trying to lure them with similar contracts but I think that’s just part of the stupidity of trying to dominate in this space.
I’m gonna assume that they signed agreements where they were only getting paid the bulk based on performance numbers tied to their presence in Mixer.
So it’s clear that their brands didn’t do shit for Mixer, and now Twitch knows this so they lost any leverage they could have. But they probably are going back to Twitch because they can get way more distribution and keep building their audience. They just won’t get the same benefits they got with those exclusivity deals.
Those streamers are clearly the biggest losers here.
If it’s true, then MSFT needs better lawyers to write their contracts.
"Facebook offered an insane offer at almost double for the original Mixer contracts of Ninja and Shroud but Loaded/Ninja/Shroud said no and forced Mixer to buy them out. Ninja made ~$30M from Mixer, and Shroud made ~$10M"
Yes, I know it is a tweet, but slasher is widely thought of as the leading game journalist, when it comes to gaming "leaks" and the like.
Contracts are a function of power.
If you are asking me to leave roughly $1.5 million+ guaranteed per year for your service that's going to bring me effectively zero for years, you're going to have to pay me quite a lot in cash.
$10 million is about the 10 year run rate--which is a bog standard valuation for a business.
I'm wondering how these contracts for the the Mixer exclusives will pay out.
non affilite/non partnered streamers don't have quality selection and if they stream 720p 60fps I have to watch that.
I honestly don't even know what's the problem because I can even stream on Twitch easily pretty much up to 10000kbps. But once I start watching almost any stream heavy buffering starts.
[1] https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/guide-to-broadcast-health-a...
I'm pretty sure they will bend the rules if you all nicely and generate enough revenue, or you have friends that work at twitch.
Nowadays, Twitch is filled with "Just Chatting" which you have people doing illegal watch parties of copyrighted content or girls showing just enough skin to not get banned. Twitch is slowly becoming a degenerate platform.
Are you 80?