As I write this, the main channel on Mixer is now broadcasting a sequence of Yellow Pokémon played by who is chatting – á Twitch Plays Pokemon. It’s titled “YouPlay Presents: Mixer Doomsday Party. Let’s Go Last Time! (Day 19/19)”, and 1,337 people are watching. Almost any other stream on the site is similarly titled. These are mostly replays of previous broadcasts that urge viewers to follow broadcasters to Twitch and streamers who are AFK but broadcast a game anyway. Even if his pulse hasn’t stopped forever, Mixer is dead, and the site closed today according to Microsoft’s announcement in June.
It was not always so. Although Mixer followed almost any other live streaming site by almost any metric you could name, it had managed to cultivate a dedicated community of partners who loved streaming on the site because it was smaller and more united. That was not Twitch. Mixer also started the war of exclusivity for streamers, which raised salaries for top talent and started some awkward conversations across the industry, which is likely to be his enduring legacy. And the technology that powered the site was incredibly low latency, which meant that transmitters could interact with their viewers in near real time. But the site never captured the large general audience it needed for Microsoft to justify how much it spent on keeping the lights on.
I spent much of the last month talking to Mixer partners about the site’s impending closure. Everyone was amazed at how quickly everything fell apart; for one person, they felt they had lost their home. I had a true sense of community from them, as the other streamers on the site were almost familiar. Most of those people decided to go to Twitch, a place where, for one reason or another, they had not always felt welcome. For me, the craziest thing about talking to those streamers was hearing about their moves to other services, because their task now is to rebuild their audience on a new platform. You cannot take all your viewers with you because there is no way to exactly replicate the circumstances that led them to your channel; you can’t recreate chance, not really.
That said, you can recreate a community of streamers. Right after Mixer’s “strategic partnership” with Facebook Gaming was announced, a spreadsheet began circulating among Mixer’s streamers (and before that, Beam) who had been on the platform the longest. It was a file of new Twitch usernames, intended to help streamers meet. There, alphabetically and linked, were the people who made Mixer what he was, ready to introduce each other again.
