Player Power

The biggest streamer on the planet abandons Twitch, and begins a new chapter in the evolution of game broadcasting

Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. Chances are we will never know how much it cost to persuade the most famous streamer on the planet, Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins, to move from Amazon’s Twitch to Microsoft’s Mixer. And it is probably better that way. One rumour put the figure at $10m a year for the next five years; in all truth, that is probably on the conservative side. At his peak in 2018, Blevins had some 200,000 subscribers and over 14 million followers on Twitch. He was banking seven figures a month. For all that his star has fallen somewhat since then, he remains the poster boy for live game streaming, and likely will for some time to come. His services will not have come cheap.

Yet this is more than just a story about money – though as with anything involving influencers, cash is at the root of it. In addition it reveals much about how Microsoft, Amazon, and Blevins himself see the future of professional streaming.

First, it exposes two very different corporate strategies for building and developing a streaming platform. Twitch’s explosive success has had very little to do with Amazon, which bought it in 2014 for $970 million, by which point it was already one of the top-five traffic sources in North America. It was a strategic acquisition, designed in part to bolster the growth of Amazon Web Services while also laying the groundwork for Amazon Lumberyard, the CryEngine fork Amazon launched in 2016.