To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. That particular acquisition kicked off the war for live-streaming talent, which resulted in YouTube, Facebook Gaming, and Twitch signing many other big names in the streaming space and more than a few paydays for the beneficiaries. Before last August, explicitly exclusive contracts and professional sports-esque paydays were rare, even though the biggest live-streamers were commanding huge audiences.
It also kicked off a grand experiment: how would viewers respond to their favorite streamers moving to other platforms? Blevins saw a huge decrease in viewership, though he was by far the biggest name on Mixer, and his follower count dropped by more than 10 million.
Facebook Gaming, for its part, will honor partner status for streamers coming from Mixer, though they will have to sign a new contract with Facebook. This part of the experiment, it seems, is over. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week.
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Since Blevins has been vigilant about social distancing, his natural light brown color is beginning to peek out at the roots. For most streamers, an extended hiatus like this would be a career killer. In fact, this break might be the best thing that could have happened to him.
For the past decade, Blevins has been running on the hamster wheel of streaming fame. Like many suburban middle-class kids, he started playing games as a fun way to pass the time between school and soccer practice. It was never anything more than that. Soon, he began regularly playing on the professional circuit. It was at one of those matches that he first met Jessica, who was there to watch an ex-boyfriend. So, while he was taking courses at Silver Lake College, a small Catholic school in Wisconsin, Blevins began live-streaming in for a new website called Twitch.
They were the ones who convinced him to ditch Halo , which had hit a ceiling in popularity, and go after online battle royale games like H1Z1 and PUBG that had the potential to reach a much larger audience. After he started to win, his streams took off.
At this point, Blevins was making a comfortable six figures, and he and Jessica, who studied communications and human resource management in college, were managing his career from their small apartment.
While he was streaming for plus hours a day, she would be on the phone, trying to convince anyone who would listen to sponsor him. In , Epic Games released battle royale game Fortnite , and Blevins noticed that it was attracting many young players, even as a lot of hard-core streamers wrote it off as childish. I Still Love You and who began streaming at the behest of Blevins. Then, one night in , Blevins found himself playing Fortnite with Drake. During the winter of that year, ChampagnePapi began following him on Instagram.
They set a date for Friday night. Blevins waited up until 2 a. In summer , Microsoft presented Blevins with a lifeline. The tech giant was looking to take on Twitch with Mixer, the rival streaming service it had acquired in , and it wanted Ninja to sign on as an exclusive partner. Twitter Tweet. Email Email. Comment Comment. Jason Guisao. Email Twitter. Products In This Article. Fortnite Platform:. Popular Content.
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