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Twitch streamer Ninja leaves Twitch and will be streaming on Mixer
@ninja:
The next chapter, https://t.co/lvn9KBjEYq https://t.co/tljVgyM3bG
I'm really not into watching streamers at all (or Fortnite), but this is absolutely huge, really. Ninja is basically the face of game streaming. I imagine that Twitch also has to be pissed about this, since they've done a lot for him, and there are a lot of associations between him and Twitch that probably all need to be re-evaluated now.
I have to wonder how much Microsoft had to pay for this, since I'm pretty sure even getting Ninja to play your game for an hour on stream costs $10,000+. Getting him to entirely switch platforms along with the risk of alienating a lot of his audience had to be insanely expensive.
I'd guess that this will be a worthwhile move for them, no matter how much it cost. I'd seen the name of Mixer a few times, but I honestly had no clue it was a streaming service other than the fact that the name seemed like it might possibly be one.
By getting him to move, they've put their new service on the radar in a big way. They may even unintentionally drag along other streamers who want to get in on a newer platform, not to mention that a lot of people will definitely follow him to Mixer and start using it.
Will they really though? Ninja has talked fairly openly in the past about how incredibly fickle his viewership is. If he stops streaming for even a few days he loses a massive chunk of viewers and subs, and it takes him quite a while to build them back up after returning. So I honestly have my doubts that many people will actually make the switch over to an entirely different platform for him.
It does make me curious about how much Mixer is paying him to do this though, since based on how closely Ninja monitors his finances and how carefully he manages them (also something he has discussed a few times on stream), he doesn't strike me as someone who would throw all that Twitch money away unless it was really made worth his while.
That's interesting. My saying that people would follow him was mostly just guesswork, and I guess I can see why he would experience that. If a lot of his viewers just want content to consume and don't really care who exactly it's from as long as there's something to watch, they'll move on to other streamers pretty quickly. Thinking about it, I've seen such behavior from my own friends and relatives who watch various streamers.
If you sub to a streamer on twitch for a month and they don’t stream once, you’ve wasted $5.
It can be toxic for full time streamers. Taking a week vacation means a whole week where people will not be renewing their sub or donating. For small and medium streamers who do it part time, they are more likely to have a dedicated core. But if you’re making lets say tens if thousands or more a month from subs, then you’re more likely to think of subs as $5 trees and they’re more likely to think of you as a tv channel.
I don't think that it's necessarily because viewers just want to be entertained and don't care by whom, although I am sure that is the case with some. IMO it's likely more just because there are so many other sources of entertainment out there now that if someone's favorite streamer takes a few days off, those viewers are likely to get preoccupied with something (or someone) else in the mean time and might not come back again for weeks... or maybe even ever again, since people do get bored of watching the same thing day in and day out eventually too. At least that's how it played out for me, anyways. I used to watch Ninja a fair bit back in the day, as I did a ton of other streamers, a bunch of whom I watched religiously and used to mod for. But after a few years of that I eventually got bored and now barely watch any Twitch at all, other than the GDQs and the occasional VOD.
Companies are paying closer to $50,000/hour for him to play their games https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-live-streamers-get-50-000-an-hour-to-play-new-videogames-online-11558184421
Way more than ten thousand per hour if it is a popular one. When it came out, some streamers were paid a million dollars to play Apex Legends for just one day!
Moving to another platform is always a risk for a big star.
Here in Britain, we had two married daytime TV presenters called Richard & Judy who hosted a talk show of the same name. Their talk show drove millions of viewers on Channel 4 for almost a decade, yet in 2009 when they took a huge payout to move their show to a new cable TV channel called Watch, they could barely scrape 30,000 viewers. Their show was quickly cancelled within weeks due to poor ratings, and they haven't been back on the telly since.
The difference here was that they moved from a nationally broadcasted terrestrial/Freeview channel to an incredibly obscure cable channel which viewers had to pay a TV subscription fee to watch. Part of the issue was that Watch was temporarily exclusive to Virgin Media XL customers, which meant millions of subscribers couldn't watch Richard & Judy's New Position even if they wanted to. When the likes of the Military History Channel and Zone Reality absolutely smash you in viewership, it's a sign that your channel is either shit or not reaching the correct audience. Nowadays, Watch (or W) is most well known for showing reruns of BBC shows.
Game streaming isn't quite like this, but people prefer to stick to their platform of choice which is why competing platforms like YouTube Gaming, Own3D, Hitbox, Smashcast, Afreeca, Dailymotion, etc haven't been able to gain traction against the juggernaut that is Twitch. That being said, Ninja might just be a big enough streamer for a move to Mixer to pay off. Or perhaps his popularity as a Fortnite streamer is waning so heavily that he took a Microsoft deal as an insurance policy.
I actually remember when Destiny switched from streaming on Twitch to Own3D, and lost most of his viewership in the process. Then again, I think the loss was because he ditched StarCraft II and had the gall to call it a dying game, then tried his hand at becoming a pro League of Legends streamer and was barely able to crack Platinum.
Well, Twitch streamers are basically independent contractors whose contracts can be unilaterally terminated or indefinitely suspended for practically any reason, with immediate effect. So getting their top earners poached by competitors should really be expected, it's just that nobody's really been willing to pay up until now. I don't know what kind of special deals mega-popular streamers might have with Twitch (I am not a streamer, never mind a mega popular one, and the ones who are, generally are forbidden from discussing the details), but I would be surprised if it didn't include a right for Twitch to immediately ban and disassociate themselves from the person for any number of reasons. And the same likely applies in reverse, except Twitch is safe in the knowledge that at least for English speaking streamers, there's really no good alternative that's likely to be as lucrative.
YouTube has the potential to be a competitor, but they're not really doing much with it. Streaming just sort of exists on YT, they're seemingly making little effort to compete with Twitch, just happy to take whoever's already on their platform and wishing to expand from prerecorded videos to streaming. Maybe Microsoft can make a dent. Monopolies are rarely good for anyone but the monopolist.
I still don't really understand the point of streaming. Are people just leaving these guys on in the background while they work/study or something? Otherwise who is following hours and hours of this content a day? Is the idea to just have a buddy there hanging out with you? And if so, how do you actually focus on your work/studies?
I have found sort of a use for long ASMR videos as a way to keep my dog calm while I'm out of the house. Human voices are soothing for dogs, so just having the computer on playing two people quietly talking to one another is nice for him, but Twitch streams are weird for this because I don't trust any of these gaming dudes to continue being calm and refrain from screaming into the mic while they're frustrated. (Needless to say, that would not be soothing for my dog). And dogs aren't responsive to advertising, so as a revenue model that just fails.
I almost only watch small to medium streams; they are the most personal experience I have ever had on the internet. You can directly interact with the streamer and the chat, and they can respond in real time. It is much more human than any other form of media I have experienced online.
Sometimes they're background noise, sometimes they're essentially comedians who incidentally play games, sometimes they're very good at what they play, sometimes it's a social experience with a stream being the focal point of a community, etc. In the case of the hyper-popular screamy funnyguys, a good portion of that audience is children but also they're just fixtures of gaming communities. I want to immerse myself in the scene of this game but I'm eating and can't play right now? Better watch
streamer.I can't say I fully relate with the draw of the absolute largest streamers like Ninja, but there's a lot of variety in that space for different audiences which helps explain the success.
Never watched him but I do know that he's the top streamer on Twitch so this (at least on the surface) seems like a big move.
it's a big move, but twitch also has significantly more than a supermajority market share of streaming right now and mixer has like 4% of it, currently, so i'm not inclined to think that even a significant shift to mixer from twitch would really level the playing field so much as make twitch marginally less dominant than they currently are.
The main question I'm left away with is: how much sway does the network effect have in the streaming world when you can apparently nab away top-tier streamers. Yes, one person, even as big as Ninja, will not even the scale, but is this the start of a trend?
I will use anecdotal evidence but I don't have ties on Twitch. I never was the type to keep my sub streak going or anything, so if my favorite streamer went elsewhere, I'd follow them because why not?
Mixer is a better experience and doesn't punish shock-jock antics (like filming in public bathrooms when little kids are in there) with only a month's suspension the way Twitch did.
It doesn't have as much market share, but I like it better.
This is the same strategy used by own3d.tv to compete with twitch. Microsoft has deeper pockets so perhaps this time it will work.
on one hand, microsoft does have deeper pockets; but, on the other hand, twitch is owned by amazon through a subsidiary, so they're playing with someone who has comparably deeper pockets to them and just as much institutional power, so i'm not sure how this will go.
Twitch was not owned by Amazon at the time and own3d did not fail to outspend twitch so much as it outspent itself into oblivion.
Microsoft may eventually decide to stop pouring money into mixer but everyone involved at least knows they will be paid what they are owed.
Has this sort of poaching ever worked for online services?