I guess the big news this morning is that Mixer is officially over and that Microsoft has sold the service and all of the accounts to Facebook Gaming. Mixer represented and alternative to Twitch.tv for those who sought it, and seemed to have fairly reasonable terms of service. I personally liked it because of the ability to have a conversation with someone sitting in chat in near real time as there was a very minuscule delay between my stream and what they saw. Because of this it is also why I tended to prefer to watch show streams on Mixer when possible, but alas as July 22nd the streaming service will be shuttered with everything transferring over to Facebook.
The real tragedy is that it seems like the partners were not told anything, and just woke up yesterday morning to the news like the rest of us. The big name acts that they specifically brought onto the platform were consulted, but it seems as though everyone else was in the dark. Facebook Gaming does not have a good reputation with gamers, and I would dare to say that a lot of folks try and avoid any interaction with facebook if possible. I saw comments from a few friends yesterday that had been streaming on Mixer as their primary platform stating that they would rather just not stream at all than to follow over to Facebook. I personally went through the process of decoupling all of my accounts from Mixer yesterday, but did not go so far as the delete my account in its entirety.
It seems like Gothycakes is one of the few named talent acquisitions that Mixer did that is planning on letting it ride and going onto Facebook gaming. The challenge is that most of the folks that left Twitch to go to Mixer in the first place experienced a massive decline in their viewership, Ninja included. It is really hard to get people to switch platforms, let alone to move over to one that a lot of folks associate with their parents more than their own interests. The Electronic Sports League or ESL signed an exclusive deal for streaming match content on Facebook, and according to reports experienced an 85% loss in viewership. That does not bode terribly well for folks asking their fans to follow them in this buyout to an already struggling platform.
What I think is more concerning however is this closes the door on what was the only real viable alternative to Twitch. Yes of course there is YouTube Gaming, but that service has had its own fraught history and in May of 2019 completely shut down the apps associated with the gaming service burying the content once again in mainstream YouTube. As a viewer watching content on YouTube live is not exactly a great experience and feels extremely minimal when it comes to fan interaction. Live Streaming gets mixed in with the accursed YouTube premiere program making it extremely hard to tell which of the people you follow are actually live and which are simply feeding you recorded content through an awkward delivery mechanism.
Once upon a time I used to stream on Hitbox, but that has apparently become Smashcast. Hitbox already had some shady moments as a service, and Smashcast seems to have doubled down on this ethic. There are of course other smaller platforms that one could stream to. If you already have an established community on Discord for example, you might simply be better just streaming through its options. What is ultimately going to happen however, is that the vast majority of streamers that were on Mixer are likely going to try and get their fans to transition back to team purple. Twitch is the massive juggernaut in streaming, and it is going too be progressively harder to compete with them. Which unfortunately means that content creators have also lost most of the leverage they might have had when it comes to negotiating with them.
I’ve been kicking around the notion of streaming again, and I had honestly contemplated Mixer because the community there has always seemed to be a big more positive than that of Twitch. However as a Twitch affiliate, there was already a strong reason just to stay with that platform since I already had inroads, not to mention that I never got organic viewership through any platform other than big purple. I feel bad for the folks who had their livelihood mixed up with Microsoft and the Mixer platform. I don’t think Facebook is going to be a favorable environment for games streaming at any point in the near future, but I guess I could be wrong. This is a significant move in an attempt to buy them some market share, and it will at the very least probably add a non-zero amount of value to the platform.
If someone has been out there waiting in the wings looking to launch a streaming platform… I guess now would be the ideal timing to do so and provide these folks who are effectively being de-platformed an alternative. I doubt that is going too happen however, and since YouTube doesn’t really seem to care much about its game streamers the lions share will come back to Twitch. What are your thoughts about this news? Do you intend to follow streamers over to Facebook gaming? Drop me a line in the comments below.
This comes as a surprise to me, while I’ve only watched a few people on Mixer the community over there seemed more interactive. I’m more than ambivalent about the huge change from Mixer to Facebook Gaming, while I can’t predict the future, I can only hope that there is no more blindsiding incidents (that’s just my own wishful thinking).
I will not be following anyone to Facebook Gaming, or at least don’t plan to. I do have a totally bogus FB account filled with fake information about a made-up person that I COULD use but still it’s a constant struggle to keep everything blocked from them.
In addition to the points you make, I don’t ~think~ YouTube has a built-in ‘tip’ system. Mixer had Embers which you’d buy with real money and tip a streamer with to help them out. (Is that what Bits are on Twitch?)
I don’t watch people play games but I do watch “creatives” playing music and things of that nature. Sending them to Facebook GAMING makes little sense; the ones I’ve checked in with seem to be going to Twitch for lack of any decent alternatives.
It was really sad to see these folks blindsided, particularly the ones for whom streaming was (apparently) a major part of their livelihood. Now they’re scrambling.
As far as I’m concerned a house could fall on Ninja, Shroud, and that kind of mega-streamer, but I feel bad for people who had a real connection to their audiences and were making a go of it on Mixer. I guess they’ve learned not to trust Microsoft.
My first thought was a bit of surprise that this didn’t need to be reviewed as an anti-trust issue. I’m probably going to write about that myself, but apparently it’s not a large enough transaction, in terms of money, to trigger review. Seeing such high-speed large-scale consolidation is… concerning.