After four and a half years, the streaming site Mixer is shutting down. Microsoft announced that they would be closing the site down on July 22 and would be partnering with Facebook Gaming for future game streaming.
This particular move comes at a highly unusual time, given that several high profile streamers such as Ninja, Shroud, and King Gothalion had moved over from other sites such as Twitch earlier this year to sign exclusive deals with Mixer. Microsoft’s transition plan has indicated that those deals will continue to be honored and “match all existing Partner agreements as closely as possible,” according to a blog post on Mixer.
As for the reasons given, the blog post described the situation.
Ultimately, the success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the platform for them as quickly and broadly as possible. 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. To better serve our community’s needs, we’re teaming up with Facebook to enable the Mixer community to transition to Facebook Gaming.
How exactly the community’s needs are somehow going to be met by Facebook Gaming is one of the big questions. While the existence of a Facebook Gaming app would undoubtedly address one of the significant logistical shortcomings Mixer had, there’s no guarantee it would be able to overcome other problems such as the lack of localization for streamers outside the US. And given the currently precarious footing, Facebook is on with regards to content moderation; there’s some question as to whether the clothing requirements Mixer has in place will be changed one way or the other.
For now, Mixer is on a shutdown clock. What replaces it will be closely scrutinized.
