She is not alone. Featured streamers like RobotGiggles will go from having 47,545 followers on Mixer to around 6,100 followers on Twitch. LenaAxios will have to walk away from her 122,423 Mixer followers for just 5,900 on Twitch. And for those few streamers who are making the leap to Facebook Gaming, it will still be a difficult journey to regain their influence. TimDubz, a professional-level Mixer partner with 25,141 followers currently only has 190 on his Facebook Gaming page.
Microsoft
Of course, these numbers will likely grow as these creators spend more time on their new gambling dens. But for many, it will probably take months, perhaps years, to regain balance. That won’t be much of a problem for casual streamers, but anyone who really made a living from the service will have to seek sponsorships and pay for concerts.
No matter where they end, Mixer streamers won’t be able to recreate the feeling of being part of a helpless streaming service. It started as a Beam and gained an incredibly fast transmission reputation thanks to its “FTL” technology. After Microsoft acquired the company in 2016, it changed its name to Mixer and went to great lengths to compete with Twitch, the current streaming leader. Last year, Microsoft paid prominent personalities like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Soleil “Faze Ewok” Wheeler to go into service exclusively.
Despite how much Microsoft tried, it couldn’t make a dent in Twitch’s market leadership. According to Streamlabs data, Mixer only reached around 81.4 million hours of streaming, compared to 3.1 billion on Twitch, 1 billion on YouTube games, and 553.8 million on Facebook Gaming, the new challenger. And even a streaming titan like Ninja could only attract 3 million followers to his Mixer account, even though he had amassed 14.7 million on Twitch. As compelling as these personalities are, it seems that many viewers would rather stick with the platform they already know.
Just before Microsoft announced that Mixer would shutdown, former employee Milan Lee documented his experience with racism at the company on Twitter. After filing a formal complaint against his manager for racist comments, the company finally decided not to punish him. Mixer responded with an apparently sincere apology, but the only action the company took was to announce its closure the next day. That made the move seem doubly disappointing to many fans.
Mixer’s small size also made it a more intimate home for streamers. “For many people, Mixer was just a streaming platform, a way to try to earn a little money or a springboard in their streaming careers,” broadcaster JRMATRIX wrote in a farewell letter. “For the rest of us, Mixer was one thing and one thing only, it was a home. It was our home.”
When asked why he chose to jump to Twitch over Facebook Gaming, JRMatrix, whose real name is Nate Flynn, told us that he is trying to maintain the community he started building on Mixer. “When we found out about the merger with Facebook Gaming, and the way we found out, we all feel a little bit exhausted,” he said. “And I think it really tainted the point of view of many people on the Facebook gaming platform, so most of us opted for what we believed to be a more secure future with Twitch.”
He added: “What I will miss most about Mixer, I think, is the atmosphere of the platform as a whole. Being much smaller, I always felt like a much more united community, and that really came along the way the streamers helped each other on the platform. I know community ethics also exists on Twitch, but given the size of the platform, I always felt a bit out of my way as a relative newcomer to streaming. Having that with me now, the ability to stream on a bigger platform it seems less daunting. It seems like we’re bribing that community spirit with us towards Twitch. “
