Microsoft’s streaming service, Mixer, is going to be shut down after four years of abysmal performance. While it is actually the second most popular streaming service on the internet, with four million unique channels, Mixer hasn’t really grown, as in the one year period between April 2019 and April 2020, it gained only 0.2% of traffic. Looks like Microsoft’s attempt to buy out the top streamers from Twitch has yielded no result… at all.
However, in order to cut their losses cleanly, Microsoft has announced a partnership with Facebook Gaming along with the shutdown of Mixer. With this, their contracts with some of the top streamers pretty much get nulled – chief amongst them are Ninja and Shroud, whose combined audiences reached over four million, accounting for 90 million total views.
They are now free to go to whichever platform they wish, but it is likely that they are just going to come to Twitch. In the past, the Microsoft buyout has reduced its audience to just a portion of what it was previously, in exchange for a 30 million dollar payout. The winner here is probably those streamers – they only have to fulfill their contracts for less than one year.
This announcement of Microsoft has been met with surprise from most people on Mixer, as they have just spent a massive amount of money trying to revitalize the site. The platform was previously integrated with Xbox, giving users the ability to stream from their consoles – with the new partnership with Facebook gaming, it is likely that FG would replace mixer to be the integrated streaming flatform of Xbox services.
This shutdown might even be related to the recent accusation of racism and sexual harassment in the streaming industry, which is pretty much a grey zone. Interested in more of our articles related to video games? Please check out this post for the top 5 upcoming games for PS5.