Big name streamers leaving Twitch to sign with its competitor sounds very familiar. Last time, the likes of Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek left to sign lucrative exclusive deals with Mixer. However, both of them eventually made their way back to Twitch after Mixer shut shop. Over the last few weeks, a similar exodus has been occurring, with big name streamers like DrLupo and TimTheTatman leaving for YouTube Gaming.
According to a report by The Washington Post, it seems that these streamers are leaving because Twitch is changing up its payment and contract policies. Multiple former Twitch employees told The Post that the company is offering top streamers lesser money for the same amount of work. It has also stopped offering the type of contracts that it used to offer their star streamers.
The sources said that DrLupo in particular was “lowballed”, making YouTube’s offer seem more enticing. The offer was much lower than his previous contract, which was signed two years ago, around the time when Ninja and Shroud left. It seems that these earlier offers were much more generous because Twitch wanted to secure the rest of its stars. However, now that the threat of Mixer is no more, the company allegedly didn’t want to pay as much.
The report notes that when Ninja and Shroud made their move to Mixer, their audience did not move with them. This caused a severe drop in the streamers’ following as fans simply found other streamers to follow. This automatically put Twitch in a place of power when it came to renegotiating contracts.
“The public has a very uninformed perspective on Twitch’s economics,” a former Twitch employee told The Post. “Anytime [a streamer’s] been paid a ton, it’s been a lot more about brand than [the company’s return on investment]. The commerce business on big channels tends to flatline at some point, and streamers don’t want to play ads — when that’s Twitch’s big upside potential.”
Apparently there were also some Twitch staffers leveraging the Ninja and Shroud incident during contract negotiations. It seems that this series of events led to Twitch assuming that it held a monopoly over video game streaming. However, with more streamers moving to YouTube, it might need to rethink that.