With Mixer Dead In The Water, Twitch’s Next Big Threat Could Be Tencent

One of Twitch’s best-known rivals, Microsoft’s Mixer, might be dead, but that’s not dissuading another tech giant from trying to take on the West’s livestreaming kingpin. According to Bloomberg, Tencent has been testing streaming service Trovo Live in the US since March.

The Chinese company has its fingers in many, many gaming pies. It owns Valorant and League of Legends developer Riot Games and it has stakes in Epic Games, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft — to name a few.

Tencent started moving into game streaming in earnest a couple of years ago when it invested in Chinese services Douyu and Huya. It bought a controlling stake in the latter in April, and the company also has its own eGame service. Now, it’s moving into the US. Trovo says in its terms of service that it’s affiliated with Tencent and its contact address is the same as Tencent’s own US headquarters. Make of that what you will.

Trovo’s website should look pretty familiar to Twitch users — it has an almost-identical design, from the carousel that promotes streamers on the front page to the chat window on the right of the screen. You can stream on the platform using a third-party mobile or desktop broadcasting app.

But Trovo’s viewership is comparatively minuscule right now. At one point on Friday afternoon, the top channel on Trovo had 225 viewers. At the same time on Twitch, the biggest stream (a Counter Strike: Global Offensive tournament) had 108,000 viewers, and more than 43,000 were tuning in to the top individual streamer.

The Fortnite section on Trovo had 222 viewers at the same time north of 262,000 were watching it on Twitch. So it’s a long, long way behind the reigning champ. That said, Trovo, and seemingly by extension Tencent, seems ready to invest to lure in content creators.

This week, it announced a Creator Partnership Program, which will ramp up in July and reward creators with $30 million in payments over the next 18 months. Streamers can apply to the Trovo 500 program if they meet a certain minimum viewership requirement, have more than 50 followers and run high-quality broadcasts.

An elite few broadcasters can earn more than $5,000 a month through the program, and those in the bottom tier can earn at least $600. Much like on Twitch, streamers can also generate income through paid subscriptions and Bits-like digital rewards called Elixir. They’re also free to keep streaming elsewhere if they participate in the Trovo 500.

The service has already drawn some broadcasters away from Twitch, YouTube and Mixer. It’s the last of those that perhaps presents the most interesting opportunity for Trovo (and Tencent). Mixer announced this week it was closing, and Microsoft teamed up with Facebook Gaming to help streamers move over to that platform and more or less pick up where they left off.

However, many are moving to Twitch instead and, crucially, Mixer’s two biggest names haven’t made their future plans clear. Microsoft reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars to lure Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek away from Twitch on exclusive contracts. But as of this week, they are free agents.

Were Tencent (I mean, Trovo) willing to park a truckload of cash up to those broadcasters’ driveways, it could bring in those two players and their large fanbases. While they never quite hit the same viewership levels on Mixer as they did on Twitch, they are easily the biggest names Trovo could possibly attract right now to bring more attention to the service.

It’s far too early to say whether Trovo could pose a threat to Twitch (which is facing its own troubles at the minute) in the long run, but it’s certainly possible. Despite their enormous resources and amid rapidly growing interest in streaming, Microsoft, Facebook and YouTube haven’t gotten close to usurping Twitch. Tencent (sorry, Trovo) is perhaps a bit different, though. It has already shown its willingness to spend big on rewarding streamers. Whether the gaming community will follow remains to be seen.