Mixer, Microsoft's Twitch Competitor and Home to Ninja, Is Dead

Mixer, Microsoft’s Twitch competitor, is dead.

“Ultimately, the success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the platform for them as quickly and broadly as possible. 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,” Mixer said in a blog post.

That new platform is Facebook Gaming and its own blog detailed what little we know right now, namely that Facebook says it wants to make the transition as easy as possible. “After onboarding, Mixer Partners will be granted partner status with Facebook Gaming, and we’ll match partner agreements as closely as possible,” Facebook said in its blogpost. “We want to maintain as much consistency as we can for Mixer Partners during this change, and we’ll do everything we can to make the transition as easy as possible for those who decide to make the switch.”

Mixer made headlines a year ago when streaming superstar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins signed a deal reportedly worth $20 to $30 million to leave Twitch and stream exclusively on Mixer. Mixer signed other popular streamers Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek and Cory “King Gothalion” Michael, but the move seemed to hurt everyone in the long run. Twitch’s viewership numbers fell. Ninja had racked up 14 million subscribers on Twitch, after a year on Mixer he’s sitting at just over 3 million.

Mixer was home to hundreds of other working streamers, putting in the time and building audiences on a new platform. Working on Mixer was always a risk. Twitch had the name recognition and the headstart and Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars betting that it could drive viewers to the service by courting Twitch’s most popular personalities

Now Microsoft has run out of patience with that strategy. Most of Mixer’s streamers found out the news of its impending destruction the same way the world did—by reading it in a tweet. As of this writing, Mixer is a wall of streamers close to tears, some angry, and all blindsided by the news.

“We literally found this out at the same time as the rest of the gaming world really,” Mixer Partner Chef7X said on his stream after the news hit. “It’s so overwhelming. How the fuck do you do that to so many people who stood up for the platform? I feel lost personally, but I hurt for not just me. There’s so many people that have been up and coming and really working hard to make a name for themselves on this platform. It’s literally just vanishing.”