Ninja is not happy.
The video game streaming star posted a video Sunday accusing Amazon-owned Twitch of using his channel to advertise other streams, including pornography.
Disgusted and so sorry. pic.twitter.com/gnUY5Kp52E
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 11, 2019
Earlier this month, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins made headlines after announcing he was jumping from Amazon’s Twitch to Microsoft’s Mixer. According to the video, Blevins said the transition was going smooth until the last couple days when there were “some things going on that we kind of let slide.”
Then Blevins found out what Twitch was allegedly doing with his channel. He said Twitch doesn’t promote streams on anyone else’s offline page, including streamers who have signed with competing platforms.
Twitch CEO Emmett Shear apologized to Blevens on Twitter. He said Twitch has been experimenting with showing recommended content on streamer’s pages that are offline. Shear said the account that streamed porn was permanently suspended.
1/ Our community comes to Twitch looking for live content. To help ensure they find great, live channels we’ve been experimenting with showing recommended content across Twitch, including on streamer’s pages that are offline.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
4/ On a more personal note, I apologize want to apologize directly to @ninja that this happened. It wasn’t our intent, but it should not have happened. No excuses.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) August 11, 2019
Ninja later said “thank you” after Twitch made changes to his offline channel.
Twitch has now reverted my channel back to how an offline page should look. Thank you.
— Ninja (@Ninja) August 11, 2019
Blevins, a “Fortnite” star, is one of the biggest names in gaming, and he was far and away the most-watched streamer on Twitch last year. He has 22 million subscribers on YouTube.
Blevins announced last week that he’s already attracted 1 million subscribers on his new Mixer page.
Microsoft launched Mixer as a Twitch competitor in 2017. Mixer is much smaller than Twitch, which accounted for more than 70 percent of live-streaming video hours watched in the second quarter of this year, according to TechCrunch. Mixer (3 percent) also competes with YouTube Live (19.5 percent) and Facebook Gaming (5.3 percent).
Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014 for nearly $1 billion.
