As the original live streaming gaming content platform, Twitch remains a major cultural hub for gamers and continues to bring knockoffs from other providers out of the woodwork in the hopes of siphoning off some of its traffic. One of the more noteworthy attempts was Mixer from Microsoft, and now the company is announcing their platform has failed even with such deep pockets backing it from the start.

Despite solid live streaming technology (from Microsoft itself), and top tier talents like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, Mixer always struggled to keep up. April viewership included 37 million hours of gaming content on Mixer, which sounds impressive until you see that Twitch’s served 1.5 billion hours of gaming content and YouTube provided 461 million according to data from streaming analytics company Arsenal.gg. The year-over-year stats are even worse. Twitch grew more than 100% between April 2019 and 2020, and yet while Twitch doubled it’s traffic while Mixer’s increased by only 0.2 percent. Mr. Grzesiek used to get tens of thousands of concurrent viewers on Twitch, but when he moved to Mixer those numbers dropped to an average of only 5,000 according to data from Twitch Tracker. For all those reasons, Mixer will be shutting down on July 22^nd of 2020 and is offloading its content provider platform to Facebook Gaming. “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 that Microsoft and Xbox want to deliver for gamers now,” Mixer said in a statement of defeat today. “So we’ve decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform.” Mixer originally launched roughly 4 years ago in January of 2016 and was originally called Beam. Microsoft acquired it a few months later and started signing top talent to big contracts. Facebook Gaming has a similar heritage but has enjoyed a healthy 72% month-over-month growth in hours watched between March and April. In April, gamers watched 291 million hours on Facebook Gaming. Making it nearly eight times more popular than Mixer. Will Facebook fair better than Microsoft or does Twitch maintain a stranglehold on live gaming content into the future. That remains unknown, but what we now know for sure is that Mixer has become an expensive failure for Microsoft and one it does not intend to maintain any longer.