9 ms·

This comes at no surprise to the game streaming community. A number of popular gaming stream helpers, namely Harris Heller from Alpha Gaming [0], have kept str

by kawfey 6y ago

This comes at no surprise to the game streaming community. A number of popular gaming stream helpers, namely Harris Heller from Alpha Gaming [0], have kept streamers away from Mixer to focus on Twitch and hosting VOD/highlights on YouTube in order to best grow a community. Facebook is a large enough platform that this might cause some trouble for Twitch, but we'll see. I think the gaming community is deeply seated around Twitch/YT. Since Facebook has already lost tons of younger users, and rejects anonymity, and doesn't have dark mode, I don't think this will turn out very good for Facebook. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCATWC1JSlhzmYeDbjnS8WwA/search?query=mixer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCATWC1JSlhzmYeDbjnS8WwA/sea...

jitl 6y ago
Nit: Facebook has dark mode
brogrammernot 6y ago
One word why I think this will work out well: money. I can see FB/MS tapping into deep pockets to offer some top streamers a great deal to move platforms. If they get enough of them to move and the service is stable, intuitive and fun to be on then I can see FB doing well. FB knows how to build communities, they know how to build engaging content and how to run that type of business. I would bet on them figuring out how to leverage their subject matter expertise on that side house to bring a very good product offering in this new vertical. There’s an ecosystem there that they can tap into as well, marketplace, pages, etc that if they can pull it off, could make it a very lucrative all-in-one solution for the streamers.
- aerovistae 6y ago
  No way. This is literally exactly what Microsoft just did, and here we have the results. Facebook can try it, and they'll fail too. There is absolutely _zero_ chance of younger demographics moving to facebook. I'm in my 20s and know many gamers in their 20s/teens and we all avoid facebook like the plague. There's no chance. We've seen it again and again and again-- you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer. All either outright failed or stole at best a tiny fraction of market share. There's so many examples of corporations trying and failing at this strategy that it's just a comic act by now.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    A Facebook property like Instagram might do well. I think more than half of the streamers that I watch have an Instagram link in their Twitch profile. Personally I hope for a good decentralized (actually decentralized, not d.live) streaming network to take off.
    - gmueckl 6y ago
      A decentralized streaming network is technically infeasible with the current Internet. Keep in mind that every watcher adds upload bandwidth requirements to a node somewhere else in the network. Consumer network connections are too asymmetric for that.
      - TremendousJudge 6y ago
        I have streamed live sports events using p2p for years and it works just fine.
        corobo 6y ago
        Got a write up or demo? Pure curiosity of how it works
        TremendousJudge 6y ago
        Nope, I have nothing. The most popular thing out there is Acestream, which is a weird Russian fork of VLC that is probably spyware but it "just works". It's closed source and I have never seen anything written as to how it works, sadly. My point was along the lines of, p2p streaming is feasible with current infrastructure because it already works under those less than ideal conditions
        corobo 6y ago
        No worries, I wasn't trying to call you out or anything it just sounded cool :)
- tmpz22 6y ago
  MS already did that by paying Ninja ~30M to stream on mixer originally. He averaged like 2K viewers. They did the same with shroud with the same result. Now Ninja and shroud are supposedly being paid out in full for their contracts and are free to sign with any platform. Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    Sorry just to clarify, thirty million US dollars? Like...the currency used in America?
    - cthalupa 6y ago
      Yes. The current rumor is that FB offered to double the Mixer contracts for Shroud and Ninja as well, and that both turned them down. Not sure how accurate said rumors are.
      - bigtex 6y ago
        I guess I don't understand as it has been already proven in the marketplace that Shroud and Ninja can't attract new viewers so why would anyone overpay for their services? The only streamer that I could imagine that could drag viewers away from Twitch would be DrDisrespect but he recently signed a multi-year deal with Twitch.
        k12sosse 6y ago
        The free prime sub is a huge deal not a lot of people are talking about. Also a huge portion of twitch subs comes from whales dropping blocks of gifted subscriptions.. especially the bigger streamers. They've gamified ePanhandling and they're falling for it
    - filoleg 6y ago
      No idea where the confusion comes from, but yeah, it was at least 30 million USD.
- stale2002 6y ago
  > One word why I think this will work out well: money. This is indeed usually the strategy. What people seem to forget though, is that Mixer is not the first streaming competitor that thought of the idea of "just pay streamers a bunch of money, and hope the viewers follow". Although, in some sense, this does work, there is a long graveyard of failed attempts. It is a bit of a winners curse. A platform can always just pay people a bunch of money to join their platform. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually making back the money that you spent on those creators. And the reality is that none of the attempts to just buy out streamers, by vast over paying for them, has ever worked, for the long term. Eventually the money spigots dry up, and the people spending the money start to wonder when they are actually going to make back on their investment (hint: the answer is never).
  - ethbro 6y ago
    The problem most companies have with this approach is that they stop short of total war. If you wanted to pay streamers to defect to your platform, then don't cheap out and try to pay a few of them. Pay all of them. As much as it takes. And blacklist the ones who turn down your initial offers. WCW vs WWF is illustrative. You can't win while a rival platform remains viable. And they remain viable as long as they can fund themselves. So either you play to drive your opponent out of business, or don't play at all.
    - stale2002 6y ago
      Although I agree with you that this strategy might work in a duopoly type situation, where there are two platforms competing against each other, in a borderline zero sum game. The problem, though, is in markets where there are more than two participants. What happens when Mixer does this strategy, as well as Facebook gaming, as well as youtube gaming? Answer: the costs shoot up into the stratephere, and all of them go bankrupt. It is kind of like a game of chicken. Massively overbidding to buy out the entire market only works if there aren't other people out there who are willing to meet you at the same level of irrationality, and burn the whole thing to the ground, along with you. IMO, the only real workable strategy, similar to this, would be if those are smaller platforms, agree to do some sort of team up (which is sorta what is happening with FB gaming and mixer), so that the irrational actors don't all lose the game of chicken.
s3r3nity 6y ago
Where are the numbers on youth disengagement? Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing. If I were a streamer that gets $ from donations, I should really target 18+ anyway, who are old enough to have a credit card. Also, it seems like FB Gaming numbers are really taking off, partly due to signing some big names from Twitch. [1] Lastly, they actually do support gamertags, but I’m iffy on the anonymity concept being a negative here. Twitch has a problem with some toxic chats, users making throwaway accounts to get around ban, etc. If I were a streamer, this would be a great alternative for me to build a community with less overhead in managing the toxic parts. All in all, it doesn’t have to be a “winner-take-all”; it’s nice to have some healthy competition in the market, even if the only folks that can do it are the biggest players (Amazon / Google / Facebook.) I’m just _really_ surprised that Microsoft couldn’t make Mixer work despite the tight Xbox integrations. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/01/09/facebook-gaming-grows-210-in-2019-as-it-battles-twitch-youtube/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/01/09/face... EDIT: grammar / spelling, as typing on a phone in 2020 is still tough
- duskwuff 6y ago
  > Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing. How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions. (And, this being the modern Internet: How many of those new DAUs are real people?)
  - s3r3nity 6y ago
    >How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions. I agree, but it's not that surprising given how strongly Facebook has dominated the North American market. In North America DAUs are at 253 million [1]; if you assume that the population of all NA is ~369 million [2], you virtually have tapped the keg, so to speak. Growth rates are going to decline once you hit market saturation like that, which has nothing to do with Product or user trends - just straight macro trends. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/population#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20North,a%200.65%25%20increase%20from%202017 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/popu....
Already__Taken 6y ago
Facebook don't really embrace the idea of an alternate persona, in fact it's almost antithetical to them. Interesting to watch this play out.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  It's still trivially easy to create an account on Facebook without using your real name. The first LPT I taught me daughters when they started using the internet is that on the internet, you are a super hero - no one should know your real name.
  - Teknoman117 6y ago
    While I do wholeheartedly agree that your online self should be an alternate, detached persona, for someone underaged, falsifying information on an account on FB is against their TOS. Their entire business model is selling data about the "real you." I don't have children, and as a 20-something I know the struggle and seeming impossibility of avoiding FB products, but I try to avoid pouring my whole identity into them. It's rough when the social culture is rapidly shifting to "unless you put everything online you're not worth my time" or makes you one of those "privacy nuts."
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      Reinforcing the need to respect a company's ToS is not high on the list of principles I'm instilling in my children.
      - Already__Taken 6y ago
        Sure I completely agree but these streaming personas are a business to some people and you might wake up one morning to the Facebook ban-hammer. Repeating the mistakes od depending on 3rd party services for a business model.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    It's also very hard to keep that account anonymous due to the crazy about of data gathering Facebook does and the ways it used that data to recommend you to new "friends" and what not.
dimmke 6y ago
The name "Facebook Gaming" seems really bad branding to me. That would be like calling Instagram "Facebook Photos" or something. It just doesn't fit at all. At least Mixer had some name ID and some high profile streamers locked into contracts.
- basch 6y ago
  This usually comes down to whether you need a FB id to sign into something. Its "Facebook" if you need to be logged into facebook to get to it. In this case, its a way to keep you on the Facebook site longer, instead of fracturing off another uninteroperable (inopreable, teroperable?) platform.
  - oconnor663 6y ago
    "interinoperable"? :)
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      "intraoperable" :D
- r00fus 6y ago
  Hey, something something Farmville...
- bduerst 6y ago
  They may put it under their Oculus brand.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
k12sosse 6y ago
Young people don't spend money on streamers like lonely men do. "The Youth" are on twitch to burn mom or dad's free amazon prime sub, per month.. another reason twitches numbers are "high" compared to others. Xbox could have spent that shroud and ninja money on free subs for Xbox gold holders.. and deliver more value, like the bezos-twitch prime sub shell game
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  What does an Amazon Prime subscription get you on Twitch?
  - vips7L 6y ago
    One free sub to a streamer of your choice per month.
    - ShamelessC 6y ago
      Is that not free? Sorry I use twitch purely as a way to do amateur streaming. Apparently I know very little about the viewership features.
      - IPTN 6y ago
        On Twitch, "Subscribe" doesn't mean the same thing as on YouTube; it is a $5 monthly donation (except when a streamer has different tiers) that gets you no ads for that streamer and, depending on the streamer, exclusive emotes/chat room access. The typical type of subscribing where you are notified about a Streamer going live is called Following.

by kawfey 6y ago

jitl 6y ago

Nit: Facebook has dark mode

brogrammernot 6y ago

One word why I think this will work out well: money. I can see FB/MS tapping into deep pockets to offer some top streamers a great deal to move platforms. If they get enough of them to move and the service is stable, intuitive and fun to be on then I can see FB doing well. FB knows how to build communities, they know how to build engaging content and how to run that type of business. I would bet on them figuring out how to leverage their subject matter expertise on that side house to bring a very good product offering in this new vertical. There’s an ecosystem there that they can tap into as well, marketplace, pages, etc that if they can pull it off, could make it a very lucrative all-in-one solution for the streamers.

aerovistae 6y ago
No way. This is literally exactly what Microsoft just did, and here we have the results. Facebook can try it, and they'll fail too. There is absolutely _zero_ chance of younger demographics moving to facebook. I'm in my 20s and know many gamers in their 20s/teens and we all avoid facebook like the plague. There's no chance. We've seen it again and again and again-- you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer. All either outright failed or stole at best a tiny fraction of market share. There's so many examples of corporations trying and failing at this strategy that it's just a comic act by now.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  A Facebook property like Instagram might do well. I think more than half of the streamers that I watch have an Instagram link in their Twitch profile. Personally I hope for a good decentralized (actually decentralized, not d.live) streaming network to take off.
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    A decentralized streaming network is technically infeasible with the current Internet. Keep in mind that every watcher adds upload bandwidth requirements to a node somewhere else in the network. Consumer network connections are too asymmetric for that.
    - TremendousJudge 6y ago
      I have streamed live sports events using p2p for years and it works just fine.
      - corobo 6y ago
        Got a write up or demo? Pure curiosity of how it works
        TremendousJudge 6y ago
        Nope, I have nothing. The most popular thing out there is Acestream, which is a weird Russian fork of VLC that is probably spyware but it "just works". It's closed source and I have never seen anything written as to how it works, sadly. My point was along the lines of, p2p streaming is feasible with current infrastructure because it already works under those less than ideal conditions
        corobo 6y ago
        No worries, I wasn't trying to call you out or anything it just sounded cool :)
tmpz22 6y ago
MS already did that by paying Ninja ~30M to stream on mixer originally. He averaged like 2K viewers. They did the same with shroud with the same result. Now Ninja and shroud are supposedly being paid out in full for their contracts and are free to sign with any platform. Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Sorry just to clarify, thirty million US dollars? Like...the currency used in America?
  - cthalupa 6y ago
    Yes. The current rumor is that FB offered to double the Mixer contracts for Shroud and Ninja as well, and that both turned them down. Not sure how accurate said rumors are.
    - bigtex 6y ago
      I guess I don't understand as it has been already proven in the marketplace that Shroud and Ninja can't attract new viewers so why would anyone overpay for their services? The only streamer that I could imagine that could drag viewers away from Twitch would be DrDisrespect but he recently signed a multi-year deal with Twitch.
      - k12sosse 6y ago
        The free prime sub is a huge deal not a lot of people are talking about. Also a huge portion of twitch subs comes from whales dropping blocks of gifted subscriptions.. especially the bigger streamers. They've gamified ePanhandling and they're falling for it
  - filoleg 6y ago
    No idea where the confusion comes from, but yeah, it was at least 30 million USD.
stale2002 6y ago
> One word why I think this will work out well: money. This is indeed usually the strategy. What people seem to forget though, is that Mixer is not the first streaming competitor that thought of the idea of "just pay streamers a bunch of money, and hope the viewers follow". Although, in some sense, this does work, there is a long graveyard of failed attempts. It is a bit of a winners curse. A platform can always just pay people a bunch of money to join their platform. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually making back the money that you spent on those creators. And the reality is that none of the attempts to just buy out streamers, by vast over paying for them, has ever worked, for the long term. Eventually the money spigots dry up, and the people spending the money start to wonder when they are actually going to make back on their investment (hint: the answer is never).
- ethbro 6y ago
  The problem most companies have with this approach is that they stop short of total war. If you wanted to pay streamers to defect to your platform, then don't cheap out and try to pay a few of them. Pay all of them. As much as it takes. And blacklist the ones who turn down your initial offers. WCW vs WWF is illustrative. You can't win while a rival platform remains viable. And they remain viable as long as they can fund themselves. So either you play to drive your opponent out of business, or don't play at all.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    Although I agree with you that this strategy might work in a duopoly type situation, where there are two platforms competing against each other, in a borderline zero sum game. The problem, though, is in markets where there are more than two participants. What happens when Mixer does this strategy, as well as Facebook gaming, as well as youtube gaming? Answer: the costs shoot up into the stratephere, and all of them go bankrupt. It is kind of like a game of chicken. Massively overbidding to buy out the entire market only works if there aren't other people out there who are willing to meet you at the same level of irrationality, and burn the whole thing to the ground, along with you. IMO, the only real workable strategy, similar to this, would be if those are smaller platforms, agree to do some sort of team up (which is sorta what is happening with FB gaming and mixer), so that the irrational actors don't all lose the game of chicken.

s3r3nity 6y ago

Where are the numbers on youth disengagement? Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing. If I were a streamer that gets $ from donations, I should really target 18+ anyway, who are old enough to have a credit card. Also, it seems like FB Gaming numbers are really taking off, partly due to signing some big names from Twitch. [1] Lastly, they actually do support gamertags, but I’m iffy on the anonymity concept being a negative here. Twitch has a problem with some toxic chats, users making throwaway accounts to get around ban, etc. If I were a streamer, this would be a great alternative for me to build a community with less overhead in managing the toxic parts. All in all, it doesn’t have to be a “winner-take-all”; it’s nice to have some healthy competition in the market, even if the only folks that can do it are the biggest players (Amazon / Google / Facebook.) I’m just _really_ surprised that Microsoft couldn’t make Mixer work despite the tight Xbox integrations. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/01/09/facebook-gaming-grows-210-in-2019-as-it-battles-twitch-youtube/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/01/09/face... EDIT: grammar / spelling, as typing on a phone in 2020 is still tough

duskwuff 6y ago
> Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing. How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions. (And, this being the modern Internet: How many of those new DAUs are real people?)
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  >How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions. I agree, but it's not that surprising given how strongly Facebook has dominated the North American market. In North America DAUs are at 253 million [1]; if you assume that the population of all NA is ~369 million [2], you virtually have tapped the keg, so to speak. Growth rates are going to decline once you hit market saturation like that, which has nothing to do with Product or user trends - just straight macro trends. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/population#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20North,a%200.65%25%20increase%20from%202017 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/popu....

Already__Taken 6y ago

Facebook don't really embrace the idea of an alternate persona, in fact it's almost antithetical to them. Interesting to watch this play out.

koheripbal 6y ago
It's still trivially easy to create an account on Facebook without using your real name. The first LPT I taught me daughters when they started using the internet is that on the internet, you are a super hero - no one should know your real name.
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  While I do wholeheartedly agree that your online self should be an alternate, detached persona, for someone underaged, falsifying information on an account on FB is against their TOS. Their entire business model is selling data about the "real you." I don't have children, and as a 20-something I know the struggle and seeming impossibility of avoiding FB products, but I try to avoid pouring my whole identity into them. It's rough when the social culture is rapidly shifting to "unless you put everything online you're not worth my time" or makes you one of those "privacy nuts."
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Reinforcing the need to respect a company's ToS is not high on the list of principles I'm instilling in my children.
    - Already__Taken 6y ago
      Sure I completely agree but these streaming personas are a business to some people and you might wake up one morning to the Facebook ban-hammer. Repeating the mistakes od depending on 3rd party services for a business model.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  It's also very hard to keep that account anonymous due to the crazy about of data gathering Facebook does and the ways it used that data to recommend you to new "friends" and what not.

dimmke 6y ago

The name "Facebook Gaming" seems really bad branding to me. That would be like calling Instagram "Facebook Photos" or something. It just doesn't fit at all. At least Mixer had some name ID and some high profile streamers locked into contracts.

basch 6y ago
This usually comes down to whether you need a FB id to sign into something. Its "Facebook" if you need to be logged into facebook to get to it. In this case, its a way to keep you on the Facebook site longer, instead of fracturing off another uninteroperable (inopreable, teroperable?) platform.
- oconnor663 6y ago
  "interinoperable"? :)
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    "intraoperable" :D
r00fus 6y ago
Hey, something something Farmville...
bduerst 6y ago
They may put it under their Oculus brand.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

k12sosse 6y ago

Young people don't spend money on streamers like lonely men do. "The Youth" are on twitch to burn mom or dad's free amazon prime sub, per month.. another reason twitches numbers are "high" compared to others. Xbox could have spent that shroud and ninja money on free subs for Xbox gold holders.. and deliver more value, like the bezos-twitch prime sub shell game

ShamelessC 6y ago
What does an Amazon Prime subscription get you on Twitch?
- vips7L 6y ago
  One free sub to a streamer of your choice per month.
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    Is that not free? Sorry I use twitch purely as a way to do amateur streaming. Apparently I know very little about the viewership features.
    - IPTN 6y ago
      On Twitch, "Subscribe" doesn't mean the same thing as on YouTube; it is a $5 monthly donation (except when a streamer has different tiers) that gets you no ads for that streamer and, depending on the streamer, exclusive emotes/chat room access. The typical type of subscribing where you are notified about a Streamer going live is called Following.