Ninja is a worldwide famed streamer that’s been known for his Fortnite gameplay streams. However, it was earlier this year that we got the surprise announcement of his departure from Twitch, arguably the biggest streaming platform in the world. While Ninja has confirmed that he would be dropping Twitch, it came with the announcement that he would be moving to Mixer, Microsoft’s streaming service competitor. With fewer viewers and a relatively new service still in the market, most would have assumed that Ninja opted to make the transition for a large sum of money, but that’s not the case.
“Money was the last thing on our mind. It’s like, they don’t even know what went on behind the scenes and how hard we tried to make that deal work — and then how amazing Microsoft was for us.”
Jessica Blevins – Business Insider
While Ninja didn’t opt to explain the move to Mixer, his wife, and manager, Jessica Blevins, stated the motives when speaking with Business Insider. There was likely a large sum of money with that deal. However, there were plenty of restrictions with Twitch according to Blevins that wouldn’t allow Ninja to grow his brand.
With the wording of how that contract was going, he wouldn’t have been able to grow his brand much outside of gaming. There were already conflicts with his current sponsors and resigning with that platform. And we were like, ‘Straight up, guys, we’ve worked so, so hard to grow the Ninja brand to license things and get his name out there. We can’t go backwards with it.’ So that’s where that deal just really started not making sense.”
Jessica Blevins – Business Insider
That seems to be a big move for Microsoft which gave the Ninja brand more opportunity to expand. Additionally, Blevins stated that the Twitch community was becoming too toxic and she felt that Ninja was losing some of the drive in streaming. Being one of the biggest streaming personalities online is going to bring trolls no matter the platform, but a nice change of scenery with Mixer and the ability to further blossom his brand may have been the change to bring back the enthusiasm Ninja once had.
Source: Business Insider, Gamerant