Mixer had potential as a streaming platform, they completely failed to create a culture anything like what Twitch has. Any streamer who wanted to move to Mixer would have to sacrifice being part of that Twitch community.
Their culture is 100% why they failed. They were technically far superior to Twitch. Their video quality was much better with lower CPU utilization, their latency was extremely low, and their UI was intuitive and butter smooth.
Their culture though... Before Shroud and Ninja joined, there were rules that you couldn't tell people your age. They had rules on how wide your shirt straps could be, and just generally seemed like if you had any opinions on other people, you would be chastised. They valued explicit political correctness, but that's not so good when you're making a place designed for just chilling and hanging out... At least, not when you're trying to grow.
They valued explicit political correctness, but that's not so good when you're making a place designed for just chilling and hanging out... At least, not when you're trying to grow.
Another way to word it is that the online gaming community is extremely toxic and you have to accept a decent chunk of that toxicity to grow a community in the gaming space.
What I am about to say, I mean with absolutely no disrespect. What you consider non-toxic is considered uptight and overly sensitive by many... Whether you think that's right or not is beside the point. I understand the need for political correctness and politicing at work. It keeps conflicts from arising and it avoids hurt feelings. It's not as valued by many people outside of work. That can affect the growth of sites like this.
Put in another way: each stream is an individual community. By making such explicit rules, they are policing culture and suppressing certain identities. That is counter to the environment needed for growth.
I don't know, I think this is a bit harsh -- I'm not arguing the gaming community isn't toxic, it certainly can be -- but rather I think Mixer wanted its community to be just like those actors who played hip 20-somethings in "real gameplay" game trailers at E3. It always seemed to have a "hello fellow gamers" mentality, and simply did not "get" the type of people it was trying to recruit.
If a stream and its viewers is a community, then on Mixer you didn't really have the chance to make that community "yours" -- rather, you had to be what Mixer wanted you to be, which is some made-up archetype of the advertiser-friendly hip gamer who captures that coveted market segment without saying anything even remotely controversial.
> They were technically far superior to Twitch. Their video quality was much better with lower CPU utilization, their latency was extremely low, and their UI was intuitive and butter smooth.
This sounds like FUD. The streamer controls the video encode, not the platform. Also Twitch has had <1s latency streaming for more than a year.
By courting big names like Ninja and Shroud though, I feel like Mixer wasn't interested in "creating" a culture, they wanted to flat out "buy" twitch's. Safe to say it wasn't successful within the past year, but I'd expect it to take much longer than that anyways. Why would they give up right after dumping a huge amount of time and money into it?
