Ninja leaves Twitch to stream on Microsofts Mixer
Fortnite star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced Thursday that he is moving his popular gaming streams from Twitch to Microsoft’s Mixer platform.
Blevins, 28, shared a video of a faux news conference with his 4.6 million Twitter followers in which he delivered the news: starting Friday at the Lollapalooza music festival, his streams would solely be broadcast on Mixer, which launched in 2016 and was re-branded in 2017.
“I know this may come as a shock to many of you, but as of today I’ll be streaming exclusively on Mixer,” Blevins said. “It’s the same me, just a different platform.”
Ninja’s inaugural Mixer stream is set for 1 p.m. Eastern time on Friday; his daily streaming schedule will run from 8:30 a.m to 5 p.m. Eastern time.
Blevins made his initial mark on the gaming community in 2011, while playing the popular Microsoft game Halo, but became a household name in the gaming community via Fortnite, the 100-player, last-person-standing survival game that boasts more than 200 million registered users. Kyle Giersdorf won $3 million on Sunday in the Fortnite World Cup solo competition, where Blevins was a highly visible presence.
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Ninja was the top trending topic on Twitter in the United States within an hour of his announcement, according to the Associated Press. Within four hours Thursday afternoon, Ninja’s Mixer account already surpassed 100,000 followers.
“I feel like this is a really good chance to get back in touch with my roots and really remember why I fell in love with streaming in the first place,” Blevins said in the video.
Blevins told the AP he was “incredibly grateful for the opportunities Twitch has provided me. But as I looked at the next step in my career, I wanted to be somewhere that empowered me to push the boundaries of gaming and achieve bigger goals within the industry. Mixer provides me with more ways to connect with my community.”
(Twitch is a subsidiary of Amazon, whose chief executive and founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
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For Mixer, Blevins’s addition provides an opportunity to cut into Twitch’s stranglehold on video game streaming. According to research by StreamElements, Twitch was responsible for 72.2 percent of all time watching live streams in the second quarter of 2019. YouTube (19.5 percent), Facebook gaming (5.3 percent) and Mixer (3 percent) were well behind the industry leader.
“We’ve loved watching Ninja on Twitch over the years and are proud of all that he’s accomplished for himself and his family, and the gaming community,” Twitch said in a statement. “We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.”
Blevins has gained a measure of crossover fame, appearing on ABC’s New Year’s Eve show with Ryan Seacrest and on the cover of ESPN the Magazine. That hasn’t necessarily translated to his streaming numbers; according to Twitch Tracker, the number of his paying subscribers on the platform declined from more than 285,000 last March to about 15,000 in July, although he still has millions of followers.
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Mixer will attempt to capitalize on its star attraction, offering new subscribers free subscriptions to Ninja’s streams and access to custom Ninja emoticons for the month of August.
In addition to adding Blevins, Mixer has introduced new streaming options that allow gamers to co-stream with up to three friends, as well as the ability to share their controllers with viewers of the stream.
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