Amazon tightens grip on live streams of video games

Late on a recent night, more than 600,000 people watched one of the most popular video game players, Tyler Blevins, engage in Fortnite Battle Royale with a celebrity guest: Drake.

Mr. Blevins streams his near-daily video game sessions live on Twitch, a website acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $1.1 billion. He makes more than $500,000 a month on the platform, thanks to his 250,000 paid subscribers, and some of his sessions can last 12 hours. Mr. Blevins, who plays under the name Ninja, is popular not only because of his gaming skill, which is considerable, but because of his draw as a host.

Drake was deferential to Mr. Blevins as they teamed up before an audience that peaked at roughly 667,000 viewers, a ratings record (since broken) for a nontournament live stream. As the game progressed, the world-famous rapper played a supporting role, collecting supplies for Ninja, seemingly content to lend a hand to a master at work. Like others who make significant money on Twitch, Mr. Blevins is a born talker, and he bantered with the fans as he and Drake played. Drake joined the conversation, too. He told the commenters that he liked pineapple on his pizza and explained that he was a Ninja fan before Twitch, back when Mr. Blevins, 27, first found fame among gamers on YouTube and Instagram.  The popularity of the March 14 Drake-Ninja summit illustrated how dominant Amazon remains in the game-streaming world, despite intense competition from a roster of tech giants: Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.

Streamlabs — a San Francisco tech company whose software allows viewers to tip streamers, giving the company insight into an opaque ecosystem — suggests that Amazon’s lead may be all but insurmountable. Its data shows that, in the last quarter, the average number of people watching Twitch’s streams at any given moment increased to 953,000, up from 788,000. Twitch’s archrival, YouTube Gaming, averaged 272,000 concurrent viewers, down from 308,000 in the previous quarter, Streamlabs reported.

YouTube pushed back against the data, but declined to provide numbers of its own. “We have truly gotten bigger every single month in live gaming, and live gaming viewership is up over two times, year over year,” said Ryan Wyatt, a YouTube vice president in charge of gaming content. (Ali Moiz, the Streamlabs chief executive, stood by his company’s report. “They should publish their data, if they think this is wrong,” he said of YouTube.) 

Twitch began in 2011 as an offshoot of Justin.tv, a lifecasting site founded by two Yale graduates, Emmett Shear and Justin Kan. They started the platform after they found that viewers were more interested in watching their lifecasters play video games than eat or sleep. Big tech companies came courting, and Amazon beat out Google.

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