Ninja, the immensely popular Twitch streamer uprooted and moved over to Mixer this week. Mixer is a very similar streaming platform to Twitch, owned by Microsoft.

At his height Ninja had 285,000 paying subscribers on Twitch with 14 million followers. Whereas Mixer’s most popular streamers couldn’t reach 1 million followers.

The big three streaming platforms, Twitch, YouTube and Facebook haven’t seen much competition from Mixer, as the Microsoft-owned platform only accounted for 3% of the total hours watched during Q2.

A Stream Elements report showed that Twitch had more than 2.72 billion hours watched in Q2, with Ninja accounting for 22.7 million hours, whereas Mixer had a measly 112 million hours across the whole of Q2.

Previous to this move Mixer wasn’t a well-known platform for gamers around the world, however with his move Ninja has sparked hundreds of articles to be written and huge amounts of PR and social chatter around the streaming platform.

Social Blade tracked the Mixer Twitter account and saw that the account gained more than 30,000 followers in just half a day.

Before leaving Twitch, Ninja recorded 20,000 paying subscribers on the platform in June. After moving to Mixer Ninja has accumulated over 500,000 subscribers on the platform in only a couple of days. These subscribers are subscribing for free as part of a promotion with Mixer that lasts for two months.

This is a very similar story when it comes to views. Mixer’s Fortnite section would average about 10,000 views before Ninja, one of Ninja’s first streams hovered around the 65,000 concurrent viewer mark, 6 times the average previous to his move.

This is a huge move for Mixer and could sew the seeds for a huge growth in the platform. This is a formula that Microsoft can continue to replicate paying to bring streamers over from Twitch. These streamers will bring their own audience and help boost the overall viewership on the platform.

Is this the end for Twitch? We’ve seen a lot of controversies on Twitch in the recent months and it seems both viewers and streamers aren’t happy with the platform.

Here marks the beginning of the end for Twitch.