Technology giant Microsoft is planning to shut down operations for its streaming platform Mixer. The company has decided to partner with Facebook instead, giving existing Mixer users the option of transferring their accounts across to Facebook Gaming. From July 22, the Mixer website will redirect to Facebook Gaming’s homepage. Mixer’s Xbox One app will also notify viewers to switch to Facebook.
Microsoft acquired streaming service Beam in 2016, and renamed it Mixer in 2017. Last August, gaming superstar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins left Twitch to exclusively stream on Mixer. That deal, which offered Blevins $20-30 million per year, highlighted Microsoft’s ambitions to grow Mixer into a top esports streaming platform. But Microsoft has now abandoned those plans.
“It became clear that the time needed to grow our own livestreaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences that Microsoft and Xbox want to deliver for gamers now, so we’ve decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform,” Microsoft said in a statement.
According to esports journalist Rod Breslau, Blevins has agreed to an estimated $30 million buyout from Mixer. Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, another popular streamer who left Twitch in 2019 to join Mixer, has agreed to a reported $10 million buyout. Facebook Gaming offered Blevins and Shroud contracts worth close to double what they originally signed with Mixer, but both gamers reportedly rejected those offers to become free agents.
