Twitch Icons Ninja and Pokimane move away from live streaming platform

Two of the biggest live streaming icons on the Twitch platform have made bold decisions to move away from the community. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is one of the most prominent gaming streamers in the history of Twitch. On Twitch, he has an active followership of 18.3 million Twitch users, many of whom regularly tune in to watch him play iconic games such as Fortnite Battle Royale. However, Ninja is one of two key Twitch personalities to drop their exclusivity deals to stream universally across multiple platforms, including YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Ninja first shot to stardom as a competitive eSports gamer, when he played in a Halo 3 eSports team. He would later move across to Fortnite Battle Royale, where his prominence would grow in a matter of months. Ninja was fortunate enough to live stream co-operative Fortnite gaming sessions with music stars Drake and Travis Scott, as well as JuJu Smith-Schuster.

Another of Twitch’s leading online content creators confirmed her plans to cut down her streaming of playing video games. Moroccan-born Canadian star Pokimane is the most followed live streamer on the Twitch platform. Like Ninja, she made her name live streaming Fortnite games, but she has also been a League of Legends sensation in recent years. While her announcement was not a retirement from Twitch altogether, her desire to create a broader spectrum of content means she will be looking to utilise other platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, alongside Twitch and YouTube.

As the leading lady on Twitch, Pokimane took her crown seriously. In a recent video, she explained that she’d been on the content grind for around nine years, live streaming her gaming sessions in what she described as a “hyper competitive industry”. Despite that competition, Pokimane reigned supreme, with a Twitch following of 6.68 million on her main Twitch channel alone.

According to Statista figures, there were 8,042,000 active streamers on the Twitch portal as of July 2022. Although this is significantly down from the 9,890,000 peak of January 2021, it remains a hugely influential streaming platform for all manner of industries, especially the gaming and entertainment space. In February 2022, it still clocked 1.9 billion hours of watch-time based on Rainmaker.gg data. All kinds of competitive games are now streamed live on the Twitch platform, including a host of popular eSports titles like League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Other online pursuits like poker also have an active Twitch community, with professionals regularly streaming their online tournaments to fans and new learners. In fact, the PokerStars official homepage has a link to its own Twitch channel, with a packed schedule of online tournaments and final table action.

However, Ninja and Pokimane have both decided now is the time to adopt a multi-stream approach to their future gaming and lifestyle content. Ninja said that his decision was a risky move, given that his exclusivity deal with Twitch used to be “guaranteed money” and “sustainability” for his streaming career. As he launched his first multi-platform stream, he described himself as “basically on my own”.

Don’t feel too sorry for him though. PC Gamer recently revealed that two hours into his first multi-platform stream he had 13,000 viewers on Twitch, 13,400 viewers on TikTok, 7,000 viewers on YouTube and a further 1,000 viewers on Facebook. The technology is certainly there to support multi-platform streaming, with Ninja utilising a live chat service called Restream which combines all live messages to him across all viewing platforms. Ninja himself is big business in the eyes of gaming publishers too, many of whom have been known to pay him a million dollars just to play and showcase their new titles online.

As for Pokimane, the 26-year-old has seemingly burnt out in the “rat race” of Twitch and chasing every kind of gaming content trend out there. With this kind of approach no longer feeling “creatively fulfilling”, it’s no surprise that she is looking at creating more organic lifestyle content. Look out for Pokimane on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, where she plans to post vlogs, fit pics and beauty video content on a more regular basis.

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