However, with Brevins recent move, more eyes have started to turn to Mixer and consider it as a viable option. It’s worth noting that this also comes at a time when Twitch has been under fire by the community for a series of questionable decisions regarding bans (or the lack thereof) against certain streamers on their platform. Now more than ever, people are wondering, “Could Mixer become a better streaming platform than Twitch?” Well, in some ways, it may already be.
HypeZone
Starting off with one of the coolest features that Twitch has never had, Mixer’s HypeZone is a series of official Mixer channels that automatically highlight and raid streamers from a select number of games while they’re in crunch-time moments of gameplay. HypeZone is currently supported for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Fortnite Battle Royale, Rainbow 6 Siege, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and Apex Legends – all shooters. To be eligible for HypeZone, all you have to do is stream on Mixer with a clear view of your in-game HUD. When Mixer detects tense moments from streamers playing these games, they have a chance of being hosted on the game’s official HypeZone channel. When this happens, live viewers are sent to the channel and it creates an exhilarating experience. I’ve personally been in a stream that has gone up from less than 10 viewers to over 200 during a HypeZone spotlight, and it was awesome. Here are the official links to Mixer’s five HypeZone channels:
PlayerUnknown’s BattlegroundsFortnite Battle RoyaleRainbow 6 SiegeCall of Duty: Black Ops 4Apex Legends
Be sure to give check them out if you’re ever looking for non-stop action!
Sparks & XP
While Twitch has follower ages and long-term subscriber rewards, Mixer incorporates an RPG-like system into its streaming, viewing, and chatting experience. Sparks are a form of currency, and XP is a way to level up your account to unlock new features and show off your experience as a Mixer viewer. Both are earned by streamers and viewers. You earn 50 Sparks per minute for broadcasting and viewing streams. However, with Mixer Pro, channel subscriptions, and Channel One, you can earn as high as 325 Sparks per minute. You can spend your Sparks to create a team, enable interactive game enhancements, launch Skills (animated visual effects) in a channel, and more. Overall, Sparks and XP are just ways to incentivize more broadcasting and viewing on Mixer.
Interactive Games
In 2014, a massive social experiment started on Twitch: Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP). TPP allowed Twitch chatters to interactively influence Pokémon games by spamming input keys in Twitch chat which would then be sent to the game. The channel peaked at over 121,000 viewers and holds the Guinness World Record for participants of a single-player online game at 1,165,140. Mixer seems to have recognized the genius of events like TPP, and they’ve built interactivity into MixPlay. This allows game developers and third parties to make their games fully interactive through Mixer. This features enables streamers to add joysticks and buttons to the Mixer overlay that will control how a game is played, allows viewers to help influence in-game decisions, and more. Interactivity is currently supported in Minecraft, SMITE, Paladins, No Man’s Sky, Killing Floor 2, Hello Neighbor, City of Brass, Phantom Trigger, and many other games. Furthermore, Mixer provides developers with all the documentation they need to help build interactivity in even more games. MixPlay’s interactive games functionality is one of the coolest Mixer features that we’ve never seen supported natively by Twitch.
Co-Streaming
Twitch actually supports co-streaming, but its implementation is nowhere near as clean as Mixer’s. It involves manually configuring your streaming software, and it isn’t supported in every channel. Mixer’s co-streaming, however, allows up to four streamers to collaboratively stream in a split-screen view to a single chat. To do it on Mixer, you simply go to your channel, click on the three-dotted options icon beside your follower count, and click on Start a Co-Stream. Here, you can invite up to three others. Once they accept, you just go live. It’s really that simple. Viewers can even choose between one of four layouts: grid, live sidebar, camera chooser, and mobile. While co-streaming is a feature that will likely be utilized by a very small percentage of streamers, Mixer putting the time and effort into executing it so much better than Twitch shows that they care about supporting streamers of all kinds. As you can see, Mixer has a lot of great things going for it for both viewers and streamers. The one thing it lacks in, severely, is numbers – viewership on Mixer streams come nowhere close to those on Twitch. However, changing that starts with you giving Mixer a chance.
