Streaming king Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who is currently the biggest name in Fortnite and one of the top performers on Twitch, has announced that he’s leaving Amazon’s platform to stream exclusively on rival platform Mixer, owned by Microsoft.
The next chapter,https://t.co/lvn9KBjEYq pic.twitter.com/tljVgyM3bG
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 1, 2019
“I’ll be streaming on Mixer full-time now and I’m honestly at a loss for words,” he said in a followup video. “I’m freaking out in the best ways. I feel like I’m going to get back to the streaming roots.”
This is quite big news. If you’re into streaming – or just passively absorbing information about it like basically everyone else – you’ll know that Twitch is by far the biggest platform in the space. For a huge star like Ninja to take up an exclusivity deal with a competitor is a big deal, and could feasibly point to a diversification of the game streaming market.
Or, of course, it could lead to nothing. Mixer has been kicking around since 2016 (when it launched as Beam) but hasn’t been able to dent the solid lead of Twitch and YouTube. If anything was going to move the needle, it would be securing a big name like Ninja.
Ninja has 14.7 million followers on Twitch and mostly plays Fortnite. He’s already secured 212,000 followers on Mixer – and one can safely assume that a solid chunk of those probably weren’t using the platform before.
In a peak month, it’s estimated Ninja made $500,000 from streaming on Twitch. It’s likely that Microsoft backed up to his house with an enormous dump truck’s worth of moolah to convince him to jump ship from that cash cow. Let’s see how it plays out!
