(CelebrityAccess) — Tyler “Ninja” Blevins one of the world’s most popular live streamers, announced that he has signed a deal with Microsoft to exclusively stream on the company’s Mixer live-streaming service.
Blevins announced the switch on Thursday, bringing to an end his longtime partnership with Amazon’s streaming service Twitch. Twitch has long been the dominant platform in the live streaming world, and Blevins is the platform’s most popular content creator, with more than 14 million followers on the service.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities Twitch has provided me,” Blevins told The Associated Press. “But as I looked at the next step in my career, I wanted to be somewhere that empowered me to push the boundaries of gaming and achieve bigger goals within the industry. Mixer provides me with more ways to connect with my community.”
Blevins will make his first live stream on Mixer on Friday, live from the Lollapalooza Festival in Chicago.
Blevins has been streaming live video gaming since 2010 but became a phenomenon with the rise of the popular game Fortnite, which has led to several key career moments for Blevins, including a 2018 event where he was joined on stream by Drake and Travis Scott.
Mixer, which Microsoft launched in 2016, has had difficulty finding inroads as it challenged the dominance of Twitch, its key rival in the market. Twitch boasts more than a hundred million active monthly users, while Microsoft’s most recent disclosure of monthly actives showed just about 10 million users.
