Grzesiek’s or ‘Shroud’ has announced he’s missed viewers who don’t care about his Twitch withdrawal.
By the end of 2019, Twitch held a monopoly on broadcasting with YouTube alone is the main opponent of the public. Shroud, the third most commonly viewed channel on the platform was regarded first and foremost as a Twitch streamer after he retired from CS:GO.
His fan base was growing exponentially on his website so he took the chance to abandon his Twitch channel and his 7,000,000 followers for a new start on the competing Mixer network in October.
In October 2019, Shroud quit Twitch for Mixer in return for a big payout.
While optimistic, there were also obvious negatives to this change, in particular, the drop in watching. This is partly down to his decision to play but has exposed yet another possible reason to lose his audience, as Shroud played more “Escape from Tarkov” on Mixer, the less successful game.
When an avid fan asked whether platforms such as Mixer could begin to deliver “10-day contracts” like the NBA as testers, Shroud explained why streaming would not work.
“There are so many people who just think that I’ll stop screaming,” he said, “you can’t really check the streams out, so people don’t know even now that I’m on Mixer. He even said a few people behind him still think he’s a part of Cloud9, the esports organisation he formerly supports as a professional player and streamer, while a few still believe he actually lives in the team house. They don’t even know that they know him.
Such confusion is probably due to the fact that Twitch has been around for a long time, as its own social media site. Since declaring its move on Twitter and YouTube, it does not even mean half the follow-through on both these sites on Twitch.
So, potentially millions of Shroud’s fans do not know that the platform has moved, and are just waiting for his return on Twitch with ignorant bliss if it ever happens.
Obviously, Shroud certainly contributed to his decision to leave the network, leading to a loss of about 2/3 of his overall viewership in the month he shifted relative to Twitch in the previous month.
But a Bloomberg report estimated that both Shroud and Ninja now have contracts of $8 million to $13 million a year, and there are also rewards and incentives, to put it mildly.
