Shroud leaves Twitch for Mixer

After leaving the Cloud9 CS:GO roster in 2017, shroud's full-time streaming career after competitive CS retirement had taken off and placed him well within the top five streamers on Twitch.

Amassing over seven million followers, tens of thousands of subscribers and cultivating his personal brand after a departure from his former organisation, shroud joining the new streaming platform will be another blow to Twitch following controversy, community backlash and the loss of the site's golden goose.

Tyler "Ninja" Blevins made the Mixer move himself back in August to the shock of many.

The ex-Halo professional moved to playing battle royale titles such as H1Z1 and PUBG before turning to Fortnite, seeing his channel and fame rise in tandem with the game. Ninja has since become a gaming representative in the mainstream media appearing on talk shows, in a Super Bowl commercial and taking part in singing competition The Masked Singer.

These moves look to establish Twitch alternatives as a genuine threat to the previously dominant force. With Mixer, YouTube and Caffeine as the main challengers, fans and streamers have more options than ever to watch content they want and build an audience.

The latter also made steps yesterday in an effort take some of the market share away from Twitch by signing an exclusive streaming partnership with Offset, the rapper and FaZe Clan investor as the New Fox co-owned platform looks to take advantage of opportunities in the space.

Caffeine has hosted multiple 'after shows' from multiple CS:GO events this year including ECS' Season 7 Finals and Community Caster Challenge as well as DreamHack Open Rio, looking to embed itself within the esports community with exclusive content.

Twitch may yet see more of its biggest stars sign deals to stream exclusively elsewhere and creators are starting to hold more power thanks to their influence.