According to StreamElements year-end report, Microsoft’s Mixer streaming service grew some 149 percent in 2019, yet still lagged far behind rival Twitch.
Amazon’s Twitch has long dominated online game streaming, with 1,256,000 average concurrent viewers. Over the last couple of years, Microsoft has tried to challenge Twitch with its Mixer streaming service, even scoring some major exclusivity deals. One of the biggest was when Microsoft poached Twitch star Ninja.
While such deals helped Mixer grow, it still only commands a mere 3 percent of the streaming market, as opposed to the 1 percent it had in 2018. The same is true for Facebook Gaming, another streaming platform for gamers. While Twitch did lose market share, it only lost two points going from 75 to 73 percent, leaving it as the overwhelmingly dominant service. Similarly, the second place streaming service, YouTube Gaming, lost a single point, going from 22 to 21 percent.
In spite of the two leaders losing market share, they both registered growth in viewership. YouTube Gaming saw a 16 percent growth rate over 2018, while Twitch registered a solid 20 percent.
According to StreamElements, the platforms cumulatively accounted for a total of 12,731,686,280 hours of viewership in 2019, up from 10,344,857,722 in 2010. In view of this report, two things are clear: viewers appetite for watching video game streaming is voracious; and Microsoft Mixer, as well as Facebook Gaming, have plenty of room to grow.