Microsoft is closing Mixer, its community-centric video game streaming service.
Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s Head of Xbox, announced the looming shutdown earlier today in a post on Xbox Wire. Mixer profiles and Mixer.com will begin taking people to Facebook Gaming on July 22nd. That gives you creators a month to ready your communities for the move to YouTube, Twitch or Facebook Gaming. In the end, Spencer says it “became clear that the time needed to grow our own livestreaming community to scale was out of measure with the version and experiences we want to do deliver to games now.”
I have never streamed gameplay on Mixer myself, not because I wasn’t interested. I’m just not good at it. I watched others on Mixer, and really enjoyed its sense of community and caring. Every chat experience I had on the platform was a good one, which is more than I can say for Twitch and YouTube. It’s a shame to see it go, but I do understand the business decisions that led to this. If Microsoft is serious about levering streaming to build an audience for Project xCloud as Spencer notes in today’s post, there’s no bigger pool of potential gamers than Facebook.
I do hope that the people who worked on Mixer are able to find positions with other teams at Microsoft.