Following in Ninja’s footsteps, Shroud announced today that he, too, will be leaving Twitch for an exclusive deal with Mixer, Microsoft’s live streaming platform. If you recall, Ninja did the same thing just over two months ago.

There’s obviously an element of risk for Shroud here – he’s banking on a large proportion of his Twitch viewers to follow him to Mixer, so we thought it would be fun to tune in live (to the numbers, not the stream – someone’s gotta do the number-crunching) to track the early returns to Shroud’s (and Microsoft’s, presumably) big bet. 

We’ll use live-streaming analytics tool Arsenal.gg to dig into the data. (We did the same thing for Ninja’s switch if you’re curious.)

For some context, let’s look at some of Shroud’s recent viewership numbers, starting with his peak viewership stream from the past month. It just so happens that his last-ever Twitch stream was his most-viewed; way to go out with a bang, Shroud.

Shroud’s recent viewership numbers

 

Shroud got his start playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and it was his first time playing that particular title in months, so maybe nostalgia drove those viewership numbers; they certainly dropped off when he was playing WoW. 

To get a better sense of where we might expect tonight’s stream to land if he’d stayed at Twitch, let’s look at Shroud’s last few Thursday streams:

Shroud’s recent viewership numbers
Shroud’s recent viewership numbers
Shroud’s recent viewership numbers

 

Simply eyeballing Shroud’s trailing-Thursday average, we’d expect him to hit ~30-35k peak viewers. 

However, using the same (admittedly very naive) methodology, Ninja beat his “expected” peak viewership by 12%, meaning we need to raise the bar a bit for Mr. Shroud.

Will he be able to hit (35k * 1.12 ~=) 39k peak viewers tonight? Stay tuned – I’ll check back in between 9 and 10 PM ET tonight. 

Based on my quick run-through of his audience numbers, I’d say Shroud’s choice of game tonight is key. If I were Mixer, I’d definitely be pushing for Counter-Strike combined with some Battle Royale games, based on the past month’s viewership numbers.

Viewership numbers

Live Updates

data as of 10:42 PM ET

Shroud kicked off his stream a few minutes after 8 ET, but wasn’t actually playing. That didn’t stop him from garnering over 70k peak viewers prior to any gameplay. (Probably not the key takeaway here, but my trailing Thursdays average * Ninja’s percentage bump calculation failed miserably. And that, folks, is why we like to build a model prior to making estimates.)

Anyway, at 9, Shroud attempted to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but was unable to access the servers for over an hour. Still, that didn’t dampen his viewership numbers by much (nearly 70k peak viewers), plus he was over 240k followers without a single minute of gameplay.

At around 10:15, he was actually able to get into CoD and start playing. (And there was much rejoicing.)

Viewership spiked pretty quickly after that, and got up to 78k, which would be his second-highest peak viewer count in the past 6 months. We’ll see if he can keep driving that number up, and maybe even approach Ninja’s Mixer debut peak viewer number of 93,148.

 

Shroud's Broadcast

 

final update: data as of 9:11 AM ET

Shroud’s 78k peak viewers shortly after he started playing CoD ended up being his highwater mark of the night. Still, though, as we discussed earlier, that’s the most viewers he’s had since early August, making it a strong debut for both Shroud and Mixer.

Shroud's Broadcast

 

And to close, some final summary statistics comparing Shroud’s first Mixer stream (CoD only) to his final 10 Twitch streams:

TwitchMixerDelta
37,25478,387+110%
26,85843,409+62%

I’m sure Shroud is pleased with the results, and it’ll be interesting to see how well he can retain his audience over the coming weeks and months. We will certainly be watching!

Reliable industry-wide live streaming data at your fingertips. 

Personalize your Xbox live streams to Mixer without a capture card or high-end PC.