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Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek became the second high-profile Twitch streamer to leave the platform in favor of a deal to broadcast exclusively on Mixer last week, and after one week, the former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pro has more than 600K followers on his new channel.
But is Grzesiek making a move that will truly grow his brand, or is he just taking an offer from Mixer that provided him an amount of money that he couldn’t refuse, regardless of what it means for his streaming career?
To get started, let’s just run through some of the important facts.
Grzesiek announced via Twitter last week that he was moving to Mixer with his first stream on the platform coming just in time for the release of Activision’s latest Call of Duty title.
In just his first stream on Mixer, Grzesiek hit peak viewership of 78K CCV and averaged 43K CCV while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, according to Arsenal.gg data that was reported by streaming software company Lightstream.
The next chapter,https://t.co/lvn9KBjEYq pic.twitter.com/tljVgyM3bG
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 1, 2019
On the day that Shroud left Twitch, he had more than 7M followers and was the second most-watched influencer of the year on the platform with 60.27M hours watched. In 2018, he was second only to Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who made the move from Twitch to Mixer earlier this year, in terms of hours watched with 96.79M hours watched.
As was the case when Blevins joined Mixer in the summer, the platform is allowing users to subscribe to his channel for free for the first month he is on Mixer. Additionally, Mixer just announced on Thursday that it is dropping the cost of subscriptions to $4.99, down from $5.99. The $4.99 mark puts Mixer’s channel subscription costs at the same level as a standard subscription on Twitch.
When Blevins made his move from Twitch to Mixer, he left more than 14M followers from Twitch, but before even streaming on his new platform, Blevins had more than 1M followers. Since that point, Blevins growth has slowed down, but he still leads Mixer with 2.5M followers. In just one week, Grzesiek is the third most-followed person on Mixer with just more than 631K followers as of Thursday evening.
This move for Grzesiek right after Q3 reports showing Mixer as having tripled its hours streamed quarter-over-quarter. However, that increase in airtime by streamers on Mixer was paired with a decline in total hours watched on the platform. Year-over-year, Mixer still saw drastic improvements in terms of hours streamed and hours watched.
For Mixer, the business strategy is simple. Blevins and Grzesiek are Twitch’s heavy hitters. By bringing them in, Microsoft’s livestreaming platform is effectively attempting to use starpower to get other influencers and their viewers to follow.
Same shroud. New home.https://t.co/eZV2GBBSsY pic.twitter.com/AHaajkjees
— Michael Grzesiek (@shroud) October 24, 2019
It’s not quite that simple though, and perhaps the most interesting analysis that can be presented on the topic thus far has come from Twitch streamer Nick Polom.
Following the news that Grzesiek was moving to Mixer, Polom tweeted, “Mixer is doing it all wrong. Instead of paying millions to individual streamers… pay that money to the viewers to watch streamers on Mixer! The streamers will go where the viewers are!”
It’s a concept that seems almost hypocritical of me to write. Over the past year that I’ve spent writing for The Esports Observer, I’ve written analysis articles week after week that regularly supports the theory that the livestreaming market is an influencer-driven economy.
But just as much as streaming is driven by influencers, influencers, in turn, are driven by viewers. You see it all the time when you hear a broadcaster explaining why he or she does or doesn’t play a specific game. Often times, people will say that they play a game because its fun, but frequently the marketability and viewer experience is a key factor.
Don’t get me wrong. As Mixer continues to fight Twitch for a share of the streaming market, having the top influencers in the industry could play a pivotal role, but it can’t be the only way that Mixer plans to compete.
In Grzesiek’s first Mixer stream, his 43K average CCV was higher than his average viewership on Twitch this year, but you can’t look at that number in a vacuum and say that Grzesiek’s debut was a viewing success.
In actuality, Grzesiek had a worse average viewership than he did at the same time last year. In 2018, Grzesiek’s average CCV when he streamed during the launch of the last Call of Duty on Oct. 12 was 65.65K.
As some of the most powerful influencers on Twitch make the move to Mixer, the dip in viewership is inevitable. So many viewers on Twitch use the website to watch a handful of broadcasters, not just one. With Blevins and Grzesiek gone, many casual fans will simply tune into another channel that they follow on Twitch more regularly.
The emphasis for Mixer at this point should be instead to mobilize viewers. They have the top tier personalities, and they’ve even offered viewers free subscriptions to those high-profile channels. Now they need to find a way to get those fairweather viewers to make the change as well.
While simply paying viewers money to watch Mixer isn’t foolproof, nor is it particularly feasible, the next step for the platform should be to pour resources into finding ways to incentivize viewers to use Mixer as opposed to Twitch.
Whether it be by forming partnerships with developers to grant viewers access to certain content by watching, or even by giving away prizes to random viewers, Mixer is going to need to pull out all the stops in order to truly compete with Twitch because even stealing its top few influencers doesn’t seem to be enough.
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