Tyler Blevins – known as “Ninja” – left Twitch in favor of streaming exclusively on Mixer in August of 2019. At the time, there was much speculation that the reason was because Mixer was paying him a lot more money than Twitch did. It turns out that is simply not so. The reason Ninja switched has to do with contracts.
Business Insider posted a detailed interview with Jessica Blevins, Ninja’s wife and manager. In it, she states: “Money was the last thing on our mind”. Business Insider notes that the value of Ninja’s deal with Mixer is kept heavily under wraps.
One of the main sticking points with Twitch’s newly proposed contract was that it would limit the licensing deals that Jessica and Tyler had worked so hard to attain in the first place.
In other words, the Twitch contract conflicted with some of Ninja’s current sponsors. Jessica Blevins said: “With the wording of how that contract was going, he wouldn’t have been able to grow his brand much outside of gaming.” Microsoft, however, was willing to work with Ninja, without restricting whatever sponsorships Ninja has (or may have in the future).
In addition, Jessica said that the Ninja chatroom on Twitch had become “pretty toxic”. It apparently was bad enough where it was making Ninja unhappy and less interested in streaming.
Twitch should take a lesson from this. I can see where they might lose more big streamers to Mixer, since Mixer’s contract seems to be less restricting than Twitch’s is. It also sounds like Twitch needs to do more to prevent chatrooms from become so toxic that big streamers no longer want stream there.
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