Level 57: Mixer's Eulogy
Mixer goes into the afterlife and gaming's #MeToo moment
Welcome to The Pause Button — a weekly gaming newsletter curating the best content in the games industry.
To receive this newsletter in your inbox weekly, consider subscribing if you haven’t already 👇
📜 This Week’s Notable News
Gaming’s #MeToo Moment: This week, over 70 individuals, primarily women, took to social media to share their stories of sexual assault, harassment, and abuse from leaders across the games industry. In wake of a renewed sense of personal activism via movements like Black Lives Matter, it’s empowering to see the support from an industry that has an unfortunate history of retaliation. The fact remains that gaming is a male-heavy industry, but there are measurable and clear ways forward. Hire more women. Open up gaming’s doors wider to include women gamers. Treat peers with respect and admiration.
If you’re in a position to hire or are part of an organization or just like to play games, it’s important to take this moment to reflect on what we — as a collective industry — and you — as an individual — can take toward being an ally. We’re always happy to connect about this at The Pause Button. Link
Mixer, R.I.P: Microsoft is shutting down its streaming platform, Mixer, and funneling all of its creators into Facebook Gaming. It was public knowledge that Mixer has been struggling with growth since its inception, but this sudden announcement feels unprecedented. There is lots to unpack here, as we’re likely starting to see early signs of a consolidation of the top streaming service much like what happened in China these past few years. Even though Mixer was #4 in gaming streaming services, this is a significant development to follow.
Breadth vs. Verticalization: Tech giants think they can check off all the boxes when it comes to encompassing gaming services. It’s clear that this is much more difficult than anticipated, especially when in direct competition (see Google Stadia’s poor performance, Amazon’s failure to launch with Crucibile, and now, Microsoft’s Mixer as examples),
The Xbox Ecosystem: Microsoft’s core gaming business still lies in the Xbox brand. They have 15 gaming studios, Microsoft Azure to power their infrastructure, Xbox live and Games Pass, etc. to back up their namesake. While certainly a big loss, Mixer was ultimately a marketing play and an add-on to power their ecosystem, not the end all be all of Microsoft gaming.
xCloud is Priority: Microsoft’s services strategy continues to pay dividends for them. We’ve seen this fundamental shift in their thought process, but their press releases here and here continue to validate this assumption. xCloud as a service is a big bet, and as they fold it into Facebook, they’ll pursue it with Sony (public knowledge) and likely with Nintendo, Twitch, Youtube (perhaps as a post-mortum to Stadia) and Apple (if we can get past they can get past App Store regulations).
Mixer’s Content Creators: Overall, content creators aren’t happy with the announcement. Streaming functions like a pyramid, so when the top dogs leave to another service, there’s more room for someone else to swoop in for that viewership. After all, users tend to stick to one product. The great promise and allure of Mixer — compared to say, Twitch — is that there is space to build community. The opportunity isn’t as material at Facebook.
The Migration: It’ll be interesting to see where creators migrate, be it to Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook. Facebook is offering a $2.5K incentive for past Mixer creators, but plenty of folks have already noted that they won’t be taking the offer due to privacy and ethics concerns.
Shroud and Ninja Win Big: Less than 12 months after signing exclusive deals with Mixer, streaming giants Ninja & Shroud have been released from their contracts, and paid in full. Despite reported offers for double their initial signing amounts (which were $30M and $10M respectively), both Ninja & Shroud have reportedly declined the move to Facebook. They’re in an interesting bind: do they value community and brand more than security and compensation? Link
P.S. Max put together a site to eulogize Mixer. Check it out over at Mixer.RIP.
💡 Industry Content
Snapchat Mini Programs: Jon Lai and Andrew Green of venture capital firm a16z discuss Snap’s Partner Summit, likening their recent HTML5-focused strategy and push for an open ecosystem to cloud gaming’s promise of accessibility. The bottom line here is that Snap has been progressing its games programs quietly but effectively. It has massive reach (>100 million users) and identity data through Snap Maps and Bitmoji. Link
Apple Antitrust Meets FB Gaming: If you’ve been on “Tech Twitter'' these past weeks, you’ve likely heard the drama of the 30% App store fee and Hey, Basecamp’s hot new email client. Apple’s monopolistic business practices aren't anything new, and have an impact that runs much deeper than email. Facebook Gaming’s app has been rejected from the App Store five times due to its nature as a games aggregator — apps within apps (same thing happens for Microsoft Games Pass). This brings up a whole host of questions around stifling competition, so much so that Apple is putting together its own internal legislative body to adjudicate antitrust. Link
🎮 Fun & Games
How to Become an AC curator: A step-by-step instruction on building a museum in Animal Crossing. Link
Nintendo Switch Gems: Editor-In-Chief of Kotaku, Stephen Totilo, put together a list of Nintendo Switch games recommendations for the NYT. Interesting collaboration here that we’re trying to wrap our heads around. Link
When your Child’s Dream Job is to Play Video Games: For kids and teenagers, there’s potential for a lucrative and successful career path in games. Video games are more accessible than ever and could be more doable to enter than height/strength dependent sports like basketball. An interesting perspective as it captures the fundamental shift of parents’ attitudes from “you can only play on weekends” to “let’s practice a couple hours today”. Link
😎 Other Cool Reads
“How to Get Worse at Starcraft”: Have you ever played a video game for such a long time that you feel like you’re getting worse at it? Perhaps it’s the tediousness or the boredom, but most likely — as author BrownBear notes here — it’s a small, unidentifiable aspect that holds you back. This piece walks us through the author’s stagnation in Starcraft II and how they improved themselves through awkward phases of pattern recognition in another similar game, Age of Empires II. Link
Video Games + Education: An argument on why video games will be a powerful medium for education in the future. There’s a lot to be said on how “fun” trumps “complexity and education” in the long run (and real life applicability of concepts), but the author makes great points about people’s willingness to learn about topics that interest them i.e history in the Civ series. Be sure to check out the great discussion on Hacker News as well. Link
Fortnite’s UX Process: “This is the first part of a two-part series, in which Celia Hodent, former Director of UX at Epic Games, dives deep into the steps needed to develop a game with UX as a priority — with examples from her time at Fortnite.” Celina focuses on how the Fortnite optimized for perception, memory and attention in their development process. Link
😍 Our Current Favorites
Fawzi (@fawzitani)
I’m a huge fan of MOBAs and was stoked to hear about Pokemon Unite, TiMi Studio’s new 5v5 game for Switch. The game already makes so much sense to me: evolutionary milestones, four core moves and hundreds of characters to choose from. “League of Pokemon”, lol. Link
Max (@maxlowenthal)
I was just as surprised as anyone at the closure of Mixer this week. Any platform of Mixer’s size, no matter how successful, is a great source of industry jobs and community. As noted above, I spent some time this week creating Mixer.RIP a site to share Mixer memories in the form of Tweets. We’ve had a few submissions so far, I’d love it if you checked it out. Link
P.S. Like The Pause Button?
You can help make it even better by: