San Francisco (AFP)

Microsoft is throwing in the towel and will close its video game streaming platform Mixer on July 22, the computer giant's subsidiary said on Monday.

As of today, Mixer's partners and "streamers" (players and content creators) will begin to migrate to the competing service Facebook Gaming.

Mixing will cut the power for good on July 22.

"We started very far behind, in terms of monthly active users on Mixer, compared to the heavyweights of the sector," explained Phil Spencer, the game manager of Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge, a news site technological.

This is particularly true in the face of Twitch, which is part of the Amazon team, at the head of this booming sector, and which has again benefited from the pandemic, when tens of millions of people confined to their homes sought to kill boredom and to be distracted by any means.

Twitch popularized the spread of video games, which allows fans to watch games like others attend football games, with the social aspect in addition: players comment on their actions and spectators interact on "chats" by parallel.

On the theme "against bad luck good heart", Mr. Spencer stresses that "the Mixer community will really benefit from the very large audience that Facebook has through its brands and the means to reach players without a hitch thanks to the Facebook social platform ".

Mixer had tried to go up the field by taking on big names like Ninja or Shroud, but that was not enough when Twitch was able to take advantage of the pandemic to diversify the offer with concerts and live shows in addition to games.

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Microsoft had to make a choice: simply shut down, sell or invest even more without guarantee of being able to really change the scale.

"It was not so much a return on sale, but to find a partner who was best for the community and the streamers," says Spencer.

Microsoft had mentioned the objective of reaching 2 billion players with xCloud (the streaming of games linked to the xBox universe) but Mixer did not do the trick to get there.

"When we think of xCloud and the opportunity to give 2 billion players access to games, we know that it is crucial that our services reach a large audience and Facebook clearly offers this to us," said the head of Microsoft.

© 2020 AFP