By now, Music Ally readers should know Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins well: he’s the gaming star who broke Twitch viewing records when playing Fortnite with Drake and Marshmello, and who subsequently signed a deal with UMG to curate a compilation album. Yesterday, he had some big news for fans: he’s leaving Twitch, the platform he’s most associated with in the public imagination, in favour of an exclusive live-streaming deal with rival platform Mixer. Fun twist: Twitch is owned by Amazon and Mixer by Microsoft, so this is effectively Ninja dumping one big-tech partner for another.
There are no details on what kind of deal Mixer put together to tempt Ninja away from Twitch – if you want our casual speculation, we’d say it must be ‘a lorryload of cash’ – but it’s a very interesting example of the kind of jostling for stars we may now see from Twitch, YouTube and Mixer in the gaming world. It’s also something of a risk: Blevins and Mixer are betting that his fans – his Twitch channel currently has 14.7 million followers – will happily follow him to a different platform, rather than simply find other game-streamers to watch on Twitch. The gaming world will be watching closely to see which of those two scenarios prevails.
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