Were Ninja and Shroud the Reason Behind the Mixer Shutdown?

The news of Mixer shutting down came as a shock to everyone. But it was even more surprising to hear that their community will be moved to Facebook Gaming. It simply failed to take a chunk of the streaming market and that was one of the biggest reasons it could not sustain. But, there may be a cause behind this that we overlooked. Ninja and Shroud, two of the biggest names in the streaming industry, were part of the Mixer community. Despite the pair streaming exclusively on Mixer, the platform failed to perform. This makes us wonder if Ninja and Shroud were the reason or part of the reason Mixer shut dow.

Let’s check the facts.

What we know about Ninja, Shroud and Mixer

Ninja is still the most followed person on Twitch with Shroud in third place. This number has stayed the same despite the fact that both haven’t streamed on Twitch in over a year. Now that’s what you call great fan following and star power.

While streaming on Mixer, Ninja and Shroud both struggled to keep their average viewer count up. Ninja had close to 3 million followers and Shroud had a little over a million. Despite that, their average concurrent viewers kept dropping.

Now at this point, Ninja and Shroud had reportedly signed a $30 million and $10 million contract, respectively. That is an insane amount of money but that’s not all. Even when Mixer shut down, the pair reportedly got their full payouts, even though their contracts weren’t completed.

Where did it all go wrong?

At this point, you already know all these facts. So what exactly went wrong here? Well, Ninja, for instance, built his community on Twitch, riding the Fortnite wave. He quickly became known as one of the best players in the game while others were struggling to get a hang of it. This is the biggest reason he is the most followed person on Twitch. Not only is he entertaining, but also seriously mechanically gifted when it comes to Fortnite. But again, stressing on the point that the majority of his community was on Twitch.

As for Shroud, he was a former professional Counter-Strike Global Offensive player. His sick clutches and amazing ability to dominate any FPS game be it Apex Legends, PUBG, or even Call of Duty, is a joy to watch. He is truly a gifted player and that was one of the biggest reasons he had such a great following.

Both these streamers made a name for themselves by walking different paths. But when Mixer announced that Ninja would be exclusively streaming for them, things changed.

For instance, it meant that Ninja’s subscribers would now have to switch over to Mixer and pay to watch him stream when they had already subscribed to him on Twitch. Many of them thought this to be pointless and just moved on to other streamers on Twitch. When you don’t have your core audience on your platform, you will definitely struggle to get views. That’s what happened with Ninja. He literally had to build his community from the ground up, even though he still had millions of followers on Mixer. Compared to his 14 million on Twitch, this was a relatively small number.

When Shroud followed suit, he struggled to keep his average viewer count up for the first few months. He eventually got to a million followers, but it took him much longer than expected.

You cannot buy followers/fans

At this point, Mixer had two of the biggest names in the industry streaming for them but they couldn’t get the job done. It may be so that you can buy talent, but you definitely cannot buy true-blue fans. This is something even Dr Disrespect said in one of his streams.

And it is 100% true. Mixer thought that breaking into the streaming space would be easier if only they could prise away two of the biggest names in the industry. Clearly, that didn’t work out. What they didn’t realize is that both Ninja and Shroud would be leaving their core community behind. Their favorite streamers shifting to a different platform did not mean all the fans would shell out extra bucks to watch them.

Yes, Ninja and Shroud did manage to get a decent number of viewers to the platform. But you can’t run an entire streaming platform depending heavily on just two streamers. By the time Mixer realized this, it was probably too late, and they eventually had to call it quits.

We’re not saying that Ninja and Shroud got bad viewership deliberately. But even they didn’t realize the unreal expectations riding on them and, well, it didn’t work at all. So, unknowingly, they were one of the major reasons for the shutdown of Mixer.

Both these streamers are yet to make a decision about their next choice of platform. They can choose between Twitch, Facebook Gaming, and YouTube Gaming, if not a novel platform. Ninja did experiment with a YouTube stream recently, but Shroud is nowhere to be found. We’ll hear of a decision from either of them soon enough.

Source-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKfaAfj_ZWs