Can you believe that Mixer is only two years old? Mixer had a wonderful outing at E3 this year with the Mixer Dome, which brought together the community in Los Angeles. Year over year the platform shows growth with users watching content on an average growth rate of more than 12% each month for the past 25 months.
Mixer’s General Manager Chad Gibson took to the official blog to talk about the platform and confirmed a few things for the service going forward.
First off, Mixer is shuttering their Mixer Create app on iOS and Android. “To help focus on these investments in new programs and capabilities, we will occasionally need to make changes to existing capabilities and will always strive to share these changes with you in advance,” the post confirmed. “This change is based both on feedback and analysis of actual usage across the Mixer community. For streamers who want to continue broadcasting directly from their mobile device, we recommend checking out the great mobile app offered from the team at Streamlabs.”
If you’re wondering why – no one used the app for its intended purpose of live streaming content from their mobile phones and thus, made the decision to kill the application. As most streamers use a home setup, it doesn’t make sense for them to use a phone when a PC and camera are close by.
Second, the platform will see some retooling in order to combat online toxicity. “Streamers on Mixer should be free to focus on creating great gameplay and fun content. You should feel in control when broadcasting – free from trolls, hate speech, bigotry, and harassment. Mixer is a community that welcomes viewers and streamers of all races, all creeds, all gender identities, all sexual orientations, and all abilities.”
He’s completely right about this. As it is, we rarely see Mixer in the news negatively, if at all. Speaking directly to the platform users, Mixer developed a series of tools in order to combat harmful and toxic behaviour. Which if it sounds familiar, is because Phil Spencer promised Xbox would be a safer haven for gamers.
“We love that the Mixer community has always prided itself on being a welcoming place, and how Mixer streamers, their moderators and viewers work together to keep toxicity down,” Gibson urges. “We know that existing features like CatBot, streamer health notifications and our Rules of User Conduct have helped maintain that welcoming vibe. Despite the efforts of many in our community, we still hear your frustrations in dealing with the toxic behaviour of a small set of people on the service – the trolls and bullies who take away from the fun experience of live streaming.”
If you come across something that isn’t right you now have a suite of options:
- You can now report inappropriate content from the player window. It’s a lot easier to report something now.
- The new Mixer Rules of User Conduct to expressly prohibit terrorist and violent extremist content.
- A new Streamer Review system helps improve validation and monitoring of new streamers on Mixer. This new system goes live August 29, and you’ll need to wait 24 hours before using a camera on Mixer.
- A new Toxicity Screen system allows streamers information and control over interactions on their channel. Expect it later this year.
- Moderators will see a new Program in place with improved tools and options to help them do their jobs, and also publicly recognizing and rewarding their invaluable contributions to the community.
- New software allows the professional moderation team to actively review broadcasts, chat, and activity on the service. This allows the team to act swiftly when needed.
Lastly, streamers can now monetize their streams. “We are adding the ability for all streamers to participate in monetization on Mixer,” confirmed Gibson. Up first be Mixer Embers, with channel subscriptions and “additional monetization features” following. This has been in development for several months, with the full program arriving later this year. Streamer Analytics is getting an overhaul as well, providing new “insights into stream health, viewer engagement and audience understanding.” Streamer Progression gets a new dashboard and makes it clearer to streamers what is needed in order to earn addition promotion, perks, monetization features and more.
A Mixer Academy is coming as well, which is a learning system that helps streamers grow their skills in areas such as audience engagement, branding, monetization, and networking.
