The big tech giant bought streaming platform Beam in 2016, and renamed it mixer a year later. It unsuccessfully poured lots of money and effort into trying to make it an alternative to Amazon's Twitch and Google's YouTube service.
Microsoft is throwing in the towel. The Head of Xbox Phil Spencer announced in a blog post Monday that the company is shutting down Mixer on July 22. and will help the mixer community transition to a new platform -- Facebook Gaming.
Spencer wrote:
the success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the service for them as quickly and broadly as possible. It became clear that the time needed to grow our own livestreaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences we want to deliver to gamers now, so we’ve decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform. To better serve our community’s needs, we’re teaming up with Facebook to enable the Mixer community to transition to Facebook Gaming.
Beginning today, Facebook Gaming will make it easy for anyone in the Mixer community to join, if they choose to do so. We will work to transition the Mixer community over the next few weeks. Starting on July 22, all Mixer sites and apps will redirect users to Facebook Gaming. For Mixer Partners, streamers, and viewers, we expect you’ll have many questions – you can find more details on how we will support the transition to Facebook Gaming on the Mixer blog here.
Transitioning the Mixer community is a key part of a broader effort that Xbox and Facebook Gaming are embarking on, bringing new experiences and opportunities to Facebook, where every month more than 700 million people play a game, watch a gaming video, or interact in a gaming Group.
The Xbox head said the company will focus on their game streaming technology Project xCloud. "Our priority and focus is on the world-class content being made by our 15 Xbox Game Studios, the evolution of Xbox Game Pass, the launch of Xbox Series X, and the global opportunity to play anywhere with Project xCloud," he wrote.