Mixer Closes Doors As Streamers Send Links To Their Twitch Pages

As the door closed on Mixer’s final day online, many of its streamers were diverting traffic to Twitch rather than Facebook Gaming.

This is significant because, when Microsoft announced that it would be shuttering Mixer, the company also announced a partnership with Facebook Gaming, hence indicating a preference that the Mixer castoffs jump there.

When the Mixer streamers do jump to Twitch though, it will be even harder for them to stand out in a crowd, notes Engadget. Mixer was a small service with only around 69,000 steamers and an average of 37,500 concurrent viewers (according to fourth-quarter 2019 stats from Newzoo).

On the other hand, Twitch has 2.2 million streamers with 1.06 million concurrent viewers. The Mixer castoffs will, in effect, be starting over from scratch. Featured streamers like RobotGiggles are going 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.

Meanwhile, the few who are jumping from Mixer to Facebook Gaming won’t be having it any easier either. TimDubz, a pro level partner on Mixer with 25,141 followers currently only has 190 on his Facebook Gaming page.

Though these numbers may grow as they establish themselves on their new streaming homes, those who were actually making a living off of the Mixer service will need to hustle for sponsorships and paying gigs. It will likely take months, perhaps years, to regain their footing.

Mixer started off as Beam and built a reputation for incredibly fast streaming thanks to its "FTL" technology. Microsoft took over in 2016, rebranded it as Mixer, and went to great lengths to compete with YouTube and Twitch. This included signing leading personalities like Tyler "Ninja" Blevins and Soleil "Faze Ewok" Wheeler to move over to the service exclusively.

No matter how much Microsoft tried, it couldn't put a dent onto Twitch's market lead. According to data from Streamlabs, Mixer only reached around 81.4 million streaming hours watched, compared to 3.1 billion from Twitch, a billion from YouTube gaming, and 553.8 million from Facebook Gaming, the newest challenger.

Even a streaming superstar like Ninja could only attract 3 million followers on his Mixer account, even though he had amassed 14.7 million on Twitch. As compelling as these personalities may be, it seemed that many viewers would rather stick with the platform they already know than make any jump.

The smaller size of Mixer actually made it a more intimate home for some streamers. "For a lot of people, Mixer was just a streaming platform, a way for them to try and make a bit of money on the side or a stepping stone in their streaming careers," Endgadget quotes streamer JRMATRIX writing 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."

There was also the matter of the manner in which Microsoft announced the coming closure of Mixer and partnership with Facebook Gaming. "When we heard about the merger with Facebook Gaming, and the manner in which we found out we all felt a little sold out," JRMatrix said. "And I think it really tainted a lot of people’s view of the Facebook Gaming platform, so the majority of us opted for what we felt was a more secure future with Twitch."

"The thing I’ll miss most about Mixer I think is the atmosphere of the platform as a whole. With it being much smaller it always felt like a much closer-knit community to me, and that really came through in the way streamers helped each other out on the platform,” he said.

“I know that community ethic exists on Twitch too, but given the size of the platform, it always felt a little out of reach to me as a relative newcomer to streaming. Having that with me now, the prospect of streaming on a larger platform seems less daunting. It feels like we’re bribing that community spirit with us over to Twitch,” JRMatrix said.