What Does Twitch Signing Nickmercs Mean For Streaming Moving Forward?

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

Last Tuesday Nickmercs announced that he would be staying on Twitch with a video showing him choosing them over YouTube before heading out to battle. This deal has been rumored to be in the tens of millions of dollars and could be the largest signing deal for a streamer to date. After a year of huge signings, million-dollar partnerships, and growing competition between streaming platforms, we need to take a step back to figure out how things got to this point and what this means moving forward.

This massive deal between Nickmercs and the Amazon-owned platform Twitch might at first seem like it was out of the blue, but this snowball has been building since Mixer signed some streamers back in 2019. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek were offered around 30-million and 10-million dollars respectively to stream exclusively on Microsoft’s streaming platform Mixer. Unfortunately, the platform shut down in June of 2020 and both of these content creators were free to stream wherever they wished. Worried that Ninja might make the move to YouTube, Twitch signed a multi-year deal with him in September of 2020 to ensure that he stayed on their platform.

Matters between Twitch and YouTube were fairly calm until August of this year when YouTube signed DrLupo onto their platform exclusively. Many were confused why DrLupo would leave behind his 4.5-million followers on Twitch, but in an interview with the Washington Post he said “The financial situation that YouTube presented me without a doubt is like, you know, I’m secure for life.”

It was always clear that money and convenience were going to be huge factors in persuading streamers to move platforms, and in September of this year, TimTheTatMan made the move to YouTube as well. In a video announcing the move, Tim said “When I started, I had no family obligations and I could [stream] a lot of hours. The reality is, now that I’ve got my wife and my son, it’s hard for me to stream as much as I did beforehand”. Tim had a huge welcoming event following the deal where he streamed with famous content creators Courage, DrLupo, and DrDisrespect.

After two big moves by YouTube, it was only a matter of time before Twitch stepped in, and their decision to go after Nickmercs was a calculated one. TimTheTatMan, Dr Disrespect, and Nickmercs were a powerhouse trio that gained high engagement rates when they played together. The three would often play Call of Duty: Warzone to hundreds of thousands of viewers and the videos they produced were regularly getting over a million views each. After being banned from Twitch last year, Dr Disrespect was not allowed to be on the stream of anyone streaming on Twitch and it wasn’t until Tim recently moved to YouTube gaming that the duo was able to play together. Now with Nickmerks tied to Twitch, the trio will not be able to stream live together, and YouTube can’t contain the three of them within their platform. This one move by Twitch effectively stops the trio from bringing huge audiences entirely over to YouTube.

Now that we have an idea of how we got to this point we can start looking at how this will affect the streaming industry, content creation, and viewership moving forward.

The good

Twitch has been dominating the live streaming space for over a decade now, and the lack of competition has decreased the number of quality updates to the platform. Youtube’s recent signings have started to shift where the big streamers and their viewers are; a move that will hopefully force Twitch to improve its platform.

Contracts give viewers an expectation that certain streamers will be tied to specific places, which helps organize a bit of the chaos.

Streamers are starting to be paid in advance for their work which helps to give a safety net to protect them from bad months with low viewers and donations.

The bad

These deals are being handed out to only the largest streamers causing a growing divide between them and smaller streamers. The big advertising money comes from larger streamers, and these signings show that smaller streamers matter less and less to these platforms.

Tying streamers to specific platforms means fewer collaborations and more contracts might cause conflicts with organizations and companies already working together on different platforms.

Google owns YouTube and Amazon owns Twitch, so victory might come down to who spends more money to acquire streamers, and not on any real improvements for each of these sites.

While the acquisitions might seem random it is becoming clearer with each new deal that these two giants are playing a complicated game of chess where each has to take the other’s pieces at the right time and for the right dollar amount. It will be interesting to see how these two platforms adapt moving forward. Let me know down below what you think of everything going on, and how you see the live streaming space evolving over the next few years.