"If Microsoft did Mixer today, it would be hot sh--," — Twitch legend Shroud reflects on Xbox's dead streaming platform, and he's 100% right

Remember Microsoft's Mixer platform? I sure do.

I loved streaming on Mixer. I used to have a fun little morning show with former Xbox alumni-turned-YouTuber RobeyTech. Microsoft purchased Mixer (then Beam) for an undisclosed amount of money back in 2016 . Later, it spent, reportedly, tens of millions acquiring talent like Ninja and Shroud into exclusivity contracts, pulling major talent away from Twitch and other competing platforms in attempts to find growth. Sadly, it was not meant to be.

Mixer shut down in 2020 releasing the big partners from their contracts and ushering people over to Facebook Gaming, which now too, is defunct. Mixer struggled to find an audience during the pandemic, which Microsoft execs took as a sign that it would potentially never work.

In 2025, we only really have Kick, Twitch, and YouTube Gaming as credible streaming platforms, with a variety of smaller upstarts battling for financial viability in a competitive landscape.

But, what if things had been different?

One of the biggest streamers in the world, Shroud, recently mentioned Mixer on a stream while playing ARC Raiders, and what he said resonated with me so hard I had to write it up.

Chatting on stream, Shroud noted how things might've been different, had Microsoft stayed the course with its nascent streaming platform.

"Mixer came too early man I'm telling you. If Microsoft did Mixer now? They would be hot sh--, not in a bad way."

When asked if he thought Microsoft would have to keep paying people, Shroud instead inferred that, now owning the likes of Call of Duty, it could've banked on innovation and integration incentives instead.

"No, because they're big enough to work with people, right? The only way to make a streaming platform work is to do what Kick does and pay everybody a bunch of money, or you provide insane incentives. Microsoft could've worked with game studios, and all of the companies they own, to make some badass sh-- happen. It just came too early."

It's a fun thought experiment. Microsoft, now armed with Activision-Blizzard, would've had the perfect vector for integrations for all sorts of products, games, and services. It could've baked Xbox Cloud Gaming directly into Mixer. It could've integrated World of Warcraft into Mixer, Call of Duty: Warzone, and various other products and services. Hell, you could even add "gaming" Copilot AI in there somehow if you want (shudder).

Yes, it would've taken a ton of investment, ingenuity, and risk — but it's hardly as if Microsoft is struggling for cash. The only issue is CEO Satya Nadella, in my view, who is unfortunately anti-innovation, and consumer-ignorant.

Microsoft CEO complained about social video eating gaming, without providing a solution

In a recent interview, CEO Satya Nadella lamented how video platforms and short-form media like TikTok and YouTube Shorts was eating into playtime hours. His admission really irked me. As the leader of one of the biggest companies in the world, this defeatist view represents the focal point of everything wrong with Microsoft all up right now — reacting to global trends, rather than creating them.

Had Microsoft stayed the course with Mixer, working to integrate it, develop it, and curate it — it would've been the perfect platform it needs to combat the so-called competition from things like TikTok. Having no video or social media platform to speak of is doing untold amounts of damage to Microsoft's consumer efforts. Its lacklustre integration efforts with Copilot have so far been a total dud, representing an endemic ambivalence towards consumer innovation.

Everyone hates how Microsoft is forcing Copilot into everything, but "fun" integrations seem to be one of the only ways AI has found even vaguely compelling use cases. If Microsoft had kept Mixer alive, it's not hard to envision a variety of ways gaming agents could've intersected with user interaction features therein, perhaps appearing inside games like Minecraft themselves.

What if players could spawn agentic AI mobs directly into Minecraft using prompts in Mixer, for example? "Spend Mixer points to spawn a giant purple creeper in Jez's game, and chase him relentlessly until you explode" or something like that. That's the lowest hanging fruit I came up with caffeinated at 8 AM.

And this is even before you consider games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Fallout 76, hell, even Candy Crush itself — Microsoft owns all of these properties. It would've had endless amounts of opportunities to integrate them into Mixer, creating a dynamic ecosystem that, as Shroud says, would preclude the need to throw cash around to get people to use it.

Then, you build up an Bing video ads platform, create a clips ecosystem to take on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, and oh wow, maybe you actually have the basis of the social network Satya Nadella wishes he could just materialize into existence.

Yes, I'm grossly oversimplifying. It's easy to do the "coulda shoulda" from a keyboard. But, Microsoft is one of the most prolific and privileged companies in history. Nadella's defeatism over Xbox and gaming vs. social media is painfully reminiscent of the way Windows Phone died.

Achieving all of this would've take real work, real innovation, and real ingenuity — something Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella seems to despise these days if he can't just buy it ready-cooked. Alas, what could've been if Microsoft wasn't so terminally short-term.

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