After weeks of wailing and worrying, Twitch has finally been acquired by one of the Internet giants. Except, it wasn’t Google. Instead, Amazon has agreed to purchase the live streaming destination for $970 million in cash. The deal will be officially completed sometime before the end of the year.
“Amazon and Twitch optimize for our customers first and are both believers in the future of gaming,” said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. “Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently. This change will mean great things for our community, and will let us bring Twitch to even more people around the world.”
“Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month – from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming conferences like E3. And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Like Twitch, we obsess over customers and like to think differently, and we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.”
Last month, more than 55 million unique visitors passed through Twitch while viewing more than 15 billion minutes of content from the company’s more than one million broadcasters. Now, I think we all need to take a minute and let this news sink in.
