Following the highly publicized departure of #1 streamer Ninja from the platform earlier this year, a lot of people began to speculate what the future looked like for the platform. Sure, Twitch retains millions of loyal viewers and thousands of popular streamers across various niches, but the signs of trouble began to brew even then. Now, with the recent departure of Shroud — another of the top 10 most-popular streamers to rival Mixer — there seems to be some growing discontent among the top streamers.
The next name to announce the transition to the smaller lesser-known platform is King Gothalion. He announced that he would be making the jump to Mixer, a decision which he described as “easy peasy.” Gothalion has built a consistently strong and loyal audience over the years, which he even translated into a major cause for good with his various charity efforts.
Gothalion is the owner and founder of GuardianCon, a Destiny-focused convention that also serves as a major charity event, and although event rebranded to Gaming Community Expo (GCX) for 2020 and beyond, it remains a a major nexus for gamers and charity fundraising. And looking at his Twitch numbers, King Gothalion is consistently a top earner. His peak of 10,000 subscribers, with an average around 8,000 these last few months, places him firmly in the top 50 names on the platform. So even though he’s not as huge as the names that have also made the jump to Mixer, it definitely signals a change. His main channel will now be a Mixer exclusive brand, much like Shroud and Ninja, but Gothalion will still appear on stream on other platforms.
The streamer cites the desire to work directly with Microsoft and Mixer as a huge plus, as it will allow him to build professional relationships with various companies that could seriously buoy both his career and charity efforts.
There still remains a ton of uncertainty around the future of Mixer and their relations with Twitch. The expediency of this new crop of exclusivity announcement reveals that Microsoft is throwing a lot of time and money into building the brand recognition of Mixer. Although it has yet to see long-term explosive gains, it feels as though Microsoft is just getting started and will continue poaching talent in order to compete with Twitch.
Mixer still have a very long way to go though, as the total viewership on Mixer right now is less than the viewership for a single top game on Twitch. For example, Call of Duty Modern Warfare draws around 150,000 viewers on Twitch at the time of writing. Combined the top 20 games on Mixer are drawing less than 40,000 viewers in that same timeframe; with only a few thousand more viewers scattered across the hundreds of other games on Mixer.
Gothalion’s first stream on Mixer will be Tuesday at 5:00 am PT. Viewers can go to Mixer.com/KingGothalion and claim a free month’s subscription for a limited time.
