If I'm Twitch the #1 thing I'm thinking about right now is how to extend the olive branch to all of these creators. Favorable partner terms, sponsorship, resources etc.
This is a market share growth opportunity that comes around very infrequently
This is a market share growth opportunity that comes around very infrequently
Twitch is already over 70% of the streaming market. Let's say that both of them go to YouTube. Let's also say that Ninja and Shroud accounted for all of Mixer's market share..
That would give YouTube roughly 20% of the market, up from about 17%. Twitch is still 70% of the market.
Twitch should be looking for ways to make it easier for streamers to stream and get noticed. Find the next Ninja.
And I'm not saying the value of acquiring them is zero. I'm saying the value of acquiring them may not be worth it.
Twitch could be a lot worse, and they'll probably get a lot worse now losing their only decent competition. The general murmur around the Twitch exclusivity deals was that they 10x'd in value and quantity after Microsoft put a price on Ninja. Unless YouTube gets serious, the same level of serious that Twitch and Mixer were, Twitch has no reason to add value to these streamers. The streamers wont leave; they can't.
And we all know YouTube won't do the right thing by their content creators, because they already don't.
This is a very dark day for content creators. Mixer failed, but it at least represented literally the only threat on Twitch's radar; there was always the question of "well what if Mixer blows up" guiding biz-dev at Twitch. Unless streamers band together and unionize, Amazon is going to crush them.
It's actually a pretty interesting economic / business model case study: they're basically crowdsourcing which streamers they subsidize while simultaneously offering a cross-promotional perk to an existing customer base.
Will most of them probably move to Twitch anyway? Yes. Will Twitch be losing money in the short-term by giving away value here? Probably. But in the long-term having these ex-Mixer folks happy and feeling welcomed will have positive impact on their fans, communities, and gaming as a whole. Not to mention the revenue potential these folks could bring.