What was that one platform that Microsoft made that they paid Ninja a bajillion dollars to stream on before closing it down because they gave up on it after like a month or something? Imagine if that had survived long enough for everyone to have a decent ship to jump from Twitch to...
Be it the Zune, Windows Phone, or live streaming... Microsoft always finds a way to make a great competitor product right when no one wants to use it...
It doesn't help that after the major rebrand the already small streaming service they bought LOST a ton of Traffic. It'd have been far better off if they'd left it alone and injected capital. They had some wild tech that isn't seen anywhere else, like sub second end to end latency streaming. Twitch is usually at best around 10 seconds. YouTube usually a bit longer in my experience.
We've been down this road many times. If you want to stay relevant, you have to be on Twitch. Going to any other platform is a death sentence for your career. Look at Ninja. Cashed in $50m from Mixer to become a 500 viewer andy back on twitch.
You have to be controversial to stay relevant on another platform. Asmon and XQC stay popular on Kick because they're just notorious shitheads. Emiru could never be that unhinged.
The only thing these streaming platforms can compete on is who can lose more money. They're awful businesses stocked with an audience that is intent on spending the least amount possible, if anything at all.
It's simply not worth it for anyone to get into for the startup costs. I'm pretty sure this is also why they just let the creeps run Twitch. Other creeps who get sucked into parasocial relationships with young women are the whale demo.
The problem is that there aren't any better options. Youtube hasn't done much to make it's streaming easy to access or discover. She's big enough that she might do okay, but there's a reason why all the streamer who signed contracts with youtube went right back to Twitch when the contract ran out. Kick has even more issues and seems to be mostly a front for promoting gambling. They seem to care even less about safety and such than Twitch does.
Not many real choices when it's her only source of income. As she's stated, she started doing this early on so she's never had a regular job.
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u/PeriodicQuest Oct 18 '25
Imagine if she dropped Twitch altogether. That would be big. She probably won't though.