A thunderbolt in the video game landscape at the beginning of the week: Microsoft stops the costs and announces the closure of the Mixer streaming platform. Most of the contingent should have landed on the Facebook Gaming side. But the big names who had signed huge exclusivity contracts – including Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek – will be released from their obligations. These two bigwigs of the streaming world had been poached with great fanfare to boost the beginnings of the platform, designed to compete with YouTube, but especially the ogre Twitch which reigns supreme in the sector. To tear them away from the omnipresent purple logo, Microsoft had pulled out all the stops with a check estimated at between 20 and 30 million dollars. However, we do not yet know if the full salaries will be paid since these exclusivity clauses were to last several years. But what is certain is that the Mixer experience will have been brief, but very lucrative.
Facebook Gaming, for its part, explains that it wishes to honor these exclusivity contracts signed with Mixer, on the condition of signing a new contract with Facebook. But it seems more likely that the best known will treat themselves to a return to their roots and go back to broadcasting on Twitch, which has been their stock in trade for years and where their audience has been built. At present, uncertainty remains for their fans and both have announced that they want to take the time to evaluate their options.
But if Microsoft is done with the platform designed for the interaction between the streamer and his audience, this does not constitute an admission of failure and it does not mean that it wants to exit this ecosystem entirely. According to Gamekult, this maneuver could serve as a springboard for xCloud, its future “cloud gaming” platform. Even though it is relatively far behind the big fish that is YouTube and the whale that is Twitch, Facebook Gaming still remains the third streaming platform in terms of popularity: in 2020, nearly 300 million hours of gameplay were watched there (compared to 461 million for YouTube… and 1.491 billion for Twitch). This is still far ahead of Mixer and its 37 million. But the figure that speaks volumes about the deep motivations for this change is to be found in another figure. Where Mixer experienced growth of 0.2% in one year, Facebook Gaming posted a record figure of 238% – the highest in the entire sector – over the same period.
It is therefore easy to understand why Microsoft wants to bet on this booming standard rather than on a black sheep that is certainly endearing, but entangled in a dynamic that is anything but encouraging. The legacy of the platform founded in 2016 under the name Beam will fortunately not be lost, fortunately. xCloud should recover certain technologies that had allowed the platform to survive for a certain time, namely its low-latency transmission systems and the emphasis placed on the collaborative aspect. It remains to We'll see when xCloud will arrive on Facebook Gaming, and whether this new service will prove more in line with Microsoft's and the public's expectations.
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