It’s clear by now that Ninja’s switch to Mixer wasn’t necessarily a move that was going to pay dividends for just Ninja or Mixer. The exodus from Twitch caused a ripple effect of influencers signing exclusive contracts with various platforms.
Pokimane talked about Ninja’s move yesterday on her stream. She explained that the real winners in the war between streaming platforms are all of the streamers who now have the ability to get lucrative exclusive contracts with whichever platform they please.
“God bless Ninja for making that move because now all platforms have to put a dollar amount on streamers,” Pokimane said. “So literally, people are paying me and all my friends to do what we were going to flippin’ do for the next two, three years of our lives anyways. So that’s how I feel about it. I just feel like we’re all so freaking lucky.”
Following Ninja’s move at the beginning of August, a number of other influencers also changed platforms in 2019, including shroud to Mixer and CouRage to YouTube. Since then, content creators like TimTheTatman, DrLupo, and Lirik have announced that they’re staying with Twitch, while others like Disguised Toast and Valkyrae have moved on from the platform as well.
Related: Valkyrae on move to YouTube: “I can truly focus on making content that I’m proud of”
Contract negotiation numbers haven’t been publicly released yet for influencers who have announced big exclusive contracts, but the video announcements for each deal have continued to exhibit grandiose production.
For Pokimane specifically, she deflected questions from her chat asking if she was ditching Twitch without making any sort of announcement herself, despite admitting that she’s “in a position to make a move.” But she added that people will “know what I’m up to soon enough.”
