Apparently Ninja has joined the ranks of the undead legions as Inside Gaming Daily has pronounced his career as having been “killed” by the Mixer deal. The duration of their presentation has very little to do with Ninja himself and essentially boils down to a hit piece on Mixer utilizing data from August as very little is currently available about the actual performance of Mixer that would allow anyone to gauge whether the platform has failed or is succeeding.
Inside Gaming Daily is the same channel that put up a hit piece against Youtuber SupMatto that was filled with factually incorrect material, baseless accusations, and outright lies. Later they received exclusive access to Borderlands 3 giving many the impression the hit piece was commissioned by Take Two as Insider Gaming Daily was also under their ire for covering leaks on their games as well, as covered by Upper Echelon Games.
Let’s set aside accusations for a second and look at the numbers. Despite my best efforts I was unable to track down a user growth chart for Mixer. What is available is Ninja’s metrics, which show constant growth in line with a platform currently growing.
Even month’s after Ninja’s departure his channel remains at the top of Twitch’s charts . Even if you take the second and third top ranked channel and add their follower counts together they still do not top Ninja’s reach after months of inactivity on the platform.
Can anyone say Ninja is not doing well or is worried as his channel continues to grow on Mixer? The notion the Mixer contract has irrefutably damaged his brand is a farce based upon cherry picked statistics that fail to have correlation to Ninja’s performance.
No one is going to contest Twitch remains the industry leader in user count and viewership. Those don’t have an impact on Ninja or Mixer’s success. What does have an impact on Ninja was Twitch using him to promote their service, while allowing his subscriber counts to significantly decline as the service does very little for their male streamers.
Jessica Blevins –Ninja’s Wife and Manager of Team Ninja- talking with Business Insider, went into detail as to why the Twitch partnership broke down. As with many male streamers, Twitch simply did not listen to the issues Ninja or his wife raised about their contract and what they needed from the platform outside financial considerations.
A significant issue Ninja faced was the restrictive nature of his contract with Twitch. As Twitch was allowed to grow their services by using him in marketing material Ninja was unable to branch out his brand beyond gaming. Any lucrative deals outside gaming were cut off to him for the duration of his term with Twitch, and with the spotlight only being generous for so long this would pose a significant problem for anyone with fame.
Following a slew of controversial incidents, some of Ninja’s sponsors even began pulling out of Twitch. When contacted over the issue, Twitch again elected to do nothing to resolve the issue as they were protecting women showing their vagina and boobs, allowing them to say the N-Word with impunity, and even carry out acts of animal abuse with no consequences, as chronicled by ItsAGundam.
Jessica told Business Insider…
“There were already conflicts with his current sponsors and resigning with that platform. And we were like, ‘Straight up, guys, we’ve worked so, so hard to grow the Ninja brand to license things and get his name out there. We can’t go backwards with it.’ So that’s where that deal just really started not making sense.”
After constant problems with Twitch Ninja took a better deal with Microsoft in exchange for $50 million, and within five days had over 1 million subscribers (paying users) thanks to Microsoft giving people free credits to spend. In a matter of a month Ninja made more money than he had over the course of a year with Twitch.
Yet we’re expected to believe Ninja’s career is over because he receives roughly a third of the viewers per video. Did it ever cross the mind of Insider Gaming Daily that the reason Microsoft shelled out the amount they did was in one part to attract him to the deal, but additionally it was to offset any losses Ninja would suffer as the platform grows?
Clearly neither Mixer nor Ninja are failing anymore than gamers are dead. Perhaps on the inside, but never in any practical way that would absolve us of taxes and increase our proclivity to voting Democrat.