Twitch streamer and megastar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced today that he will be moving his streaming channel from Twitch to Microsoft’s streaming platform, Mixer.
Blevins made the shocking announcement via a video posted on his Twitter. “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,” he states to a mock panel of journalists. The streamer, who currently has 14.7 million followers on Twitch, later said in a followup video that he had been “holding onto this [announcement] for quite some time,” and that “the streams are going to be [sic] the exact same.”
Mixer is a streaming platform that was acquired by Microsoft back in 2016, and is vastly less popular than Twitch (owned by Amazon). According to recent data from Stream Elements, Mixer placed fourth last quarter in cumulative viewer hours, behind Facebook Gaming, YouTube, and—by an enormous margin—Twitch. The same report shows that Twitch hosts 72 percent of last quarter’s watched streaming hours, while Mixer had only 3 percent.
Following the announcement, Twitch released its own official statement regarding Blevins’ departure.
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. We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.
While having an extensive history with games content and the esports scene, Blevins is most well known for streaming Battle Royale games like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Apex Legends and, most especially, Fortnite. When Apex Legends launched earlier this year, reports suggested that EA had paid several popular streamers around $50,000 dollars to stream the game, and that Blevins received $1 million for a similar deal. Currently, a report from Kotaku suggests that Blevins could be one of several streamers that have been paid up to $1 million to move exclusively to Mixer.
