In a battle between game streaming services, Microsoft’s Mixer has fallen. In a surprising bit of news, Microsoft has announced that it will start shutting down its streaming servers starting today. This means that popular acquisitions by the service such as Ninja and Shroud are free to do whatever they want…
In an announcement written by Phil Spencer, we found that Microsoft is partnering up with Facebook Gaming. Here’s a snippet of his letter:
Ultimately, the success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the service for them as quickly and broadly as possible. It became clear that the time needed to grow our own live streaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences we want to deliver to 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.
Beginning today, Facebook Gaming will make it easy for anyone in the Mixer community to join, if they choose to do so. We will work to transition the Mixer community over the next few weeks. Starting on July 22, all Mixer sites and apps will redirect users to Facebook Gaming. For Mixer Partners, streamers, and viewers, we expect you’ll have many questions – you can find more details on how we will support the transition to Facebook Gaming on the Mixer blog here.
To be fair, we could’ve predicted this move by Microsoft if we were looking only at raw numbers. During the quarantine, almost all game streaming services have seen a huge influx of users while Mixer’s user numbers stayed the same. If you can’t beat them – join them.
It will be interesting to see what will happen with Facebook Gaming with Microsoft and Xbox by its side. Phill Spencer stated that Mixer’s technology will be used to empower people, teams, and organizations to better engage in virtual gatherings at work and school.
