In a recent stream, Ninja suggested that "YouTuber Ninja" does not a good ring to it, and that the platform is not widely recognized as a "streaming platform".
Ninja had defected from Twitch last year, when he joined Microsoft’s Mixer in a multi-million dollar deal. However, after the platform shut down, he made his way to YouTube, before eventually returning to Twitch.
Recently, Ninja talked about the reason why he returned to Twitch, and also suggested that Epic Games lost out on a huge opportunity to earn millions off his icon series skin. He also compared YouTube and Twitch as streaming platforms, and said that Twitch is more suitable for gaming.
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Ninja's recent comments about Twitch come at a very surprising time.
Despite the comments, Ninja hasn't traditionally had an exclusively happy relationship with Twitch. Back in August 2019, Ninja had left Twitch for Microsoft's Mixer. The decision had come as a result of Ninja feeling that his brand is "too big" for gaming.
Both Ninja and his wife/manager Jessica Blevins, were of the opinion that the contract he had with Twitch restricted his marketing activities "outside the field of gaming."
Apparently, the two had talked to Twitch multiple times, but their wishes were either ignored or not heeded.
Despite the fact that Mixer paid over $50 million to Ninja to bring him to the platform, Jessica had said that the decision was a result of contractual restrictions and not purely about "money." Moreover, Ninja was utterly disappointed with Twitch during this time.
Back in August 2019 Ninja posted the following on Twitter. As you can see, he was angry at Twitch for using his inactive account to promote other content creators, which also included a pornographic account.
His comments come at a very surprising time. The DMCA controversy has led to quite a few streamers and personalities questioning Twitch ability/intentions of protecting their content creators. This is in addition to the issues that people are having with Twitch's ever changing ad-policies.
While Ninja has undoubtedly had issues with Twitch as a platform in the past, but his recent comments suggest that he believes YouTube is not ready to compete with the platform, at least when it comes to video-game streaming.