Microsoft’s Mixer Mystery: Was Poaching Twitch’s Biggest Streamers Always Doomed to Fail?

In late 2019, Microsoft poached Twitch’s biggest streamers (e.g., former esports professional players Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek) to catalyze their own upstart streaming platform called Mixer, which broadcast esports and gaming content. Mixer’s strategy centered on assuming that top streamers at Twitch develop their own communities and these audiences would follow the streamers across platforms and rehome to Mixer. The result was a failure, seeing Mixer shuttered less than one year later. The aim of this research was to explore why Mixer’s star-studded strategy failed through examining the potential existence of network effects (i.e., presence of power laws) at the streamer-audience level investigating whether streamers create loyal communities that stick across platforms. Using income data of individual streamers from Twitch following Clauset’s et al. (2009) methods, maximum-likelihood fitting with likelihood ratio tests were employed on Twitch streamer population incomes from August 2019 to October 2021. Results demonstrate that income for these content creators, including esports channels and professional esports tournaments, exhibit generally negative evidence for power law income characteristics at the tail of the distribution. This suggests that a preferential attachment mechanism likely does not drive revenue within the Twitch ecosystem, and, as such individual streamers (including esports professionals, esports tournaments, etc.) do not create their own networks in their audience and Mixer’s strategy was fundamentally flawed. Ultimately, Mixer should have acquired higher numbers of upper mid-tier streamers instead of a small handful of individual top streamers to target network-generating talent economically.