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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11Matt Salsamendi helped create Beam, the teenage-founded startup that Microsoft acquired in 2016 and later renamed Mixer. By the time Microsoft announced Mixer’s closure in 2020, Salsamendi had left the company—but he said he broadly understood the decision. In his account, Mixer had valuable low-latency technology yet remained an expensive, unprofitable challenger to Twitch’s entrenched audience and creator ecosystem.
The founder watching Mixer disappear
Salsamendi’s position contained an unusual tension: he defended the business logic of shutting down the platform lineage he had helped create while expressing sympathy for streamers and employees who received little warning. In a June 2020 GeekWire interview, he said Mixer was costly to operate, was not making money, and remained too far behind leading services for Microsoft’s investment to close the gap easily.
He did not describe Twitch as legally proven to be a monopoly. His concern was practical market power: Twitch had become the default destination for serious game livestreaming, making it difficult for a rival to attract both creators and viewers at the same time.
From Minecraft servers to Beam
Salsamendi and James Boehm began with gaming infrastructure rather than a conventional media company. Microsoft’s account of the company’s history says Salsamendi started hosting Minecraft servers at 13. The two founders were teenagers when they developed the business that became Beam.
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The original server-hosting work and Beam were different businesses:
- Server hosting: infrastructure for multiplayer Minecraft communities.
- Beam: an interactive livestreaming product built around immediate communication between audiences and broadcasters.
- Mixer: Microsoft’s expanded and renamed service after acquiring Beam.
The founders became frustrated that existing livestreams separated the broadcaster from the audience through noticeable delay. A viewer trying to influence a game or respond to a creator could be reacting to something that had already happened. Beam’s answer was to make interaction itself the product, not merely add another video player. The origin and pivot are documented by Microsoft.
Why Beam appealed to Microsoft
Microsoft acquired Beam in August 2016. The strategic fit was broader than buying a small streaming website: Beam’s technology and community model aligned with Xbox’s ambition to make gaming more social, while Microsoft could provide engineering resources, infrastructure, distribution and access to its gaming ecosystem.
Beam had also won TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2016, giving the young company visibility at a moment when livestreaming was becoming a central part of gaming culture. Microsoft subsequently developed the service under the Mixer name.
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What made Mixer technically different
Mixer used a low-latency protocol called Faster Than Light, or FTL. In practical terms, lower latency means a creator can see a chat message and respond while the conversation is still relevant. That matters for live polls, audience-controlled games, coaching, competitive play and any broadcast where viewers are meant to affect events rather than passively watch them.
Salsamendi told GeekWire that Mixer’s latency remained an important technical advantage at the time. That was a genuine product distinction, but it did not automatically produce the ingredients of a viable platform: a large audience, creator discovery, dense monetization and confidence that the service would still be there years later.
Why technical superiority was not enough
Mixer faced a two-sided network problem. Streamers go where viewers are, and viewers tend to follow the creators and communities already on a platform. A faster response time could improve the experience for users who arrived, but it was not by itself a reason for millions of people to change habits.
Twitch’s default position
Twitch had the established live-gaming audience, creator routines and discovery habits. Salsamendi said Twitch’s partner agreements were strongly exclusive and that its affiliate program, as he understood it in the 2020 interview, included a 24-hour exclusivity restriction. Those were interview-era claims, not a statement of current Twitch policy, but they illustrate the risk facing a creator who experimented with a smaller rival.
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Competing forms of distribution
YouTube could draw on a vast video-on-demand ecosystem, while Facebook could use its social graph and gaming push. Microsoft had Xbox, but ownership of a major console ecosystem did not translate into sufficient habitual use of Mixer as a live destination. The relevant competition was therefore not only between streaming features; it was between audience pools, recommendation systems, creator contracts and daily habits.
The switching-cost problem
A creator who leaves a dominant service risks losing discoverability, subscriptions and viewer routines. A viewer may follow a favorite personality, but not every follower will move, and smaller streamers have less leverage to bring communities with them. Mixer had to persuade both sides to switch before the network effects of switching could become self-reinforcing.
The Ninja and Shroud strategy
Microsoft signed high-profile creators including Ninja and Shroud as part of its effort to establish Mixer as a serious Twitch alternative. Such deals could signal credibility, generate publicity and test whether a star’s audience would migrate. They also gave Microsoft bargaining leverage in a market where exclusive talent was highly visible.
Public coverage does not establish the contracts’ precise financial returns, and the available evidence does not show that those signings alone caused Mixer’s closure. The larger problem was converting purchased attention into a broad, durable creator ecosystem rather than a short-term burst around a few celebrities. Contemporary coverage of the shutdown and the deals appears in TechCrunch and Fortune.
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Why Microsoft pulled the plug
The shutdown timeline was short once announced:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 22, 2020 | Microsoft announced that Mixer would close and that it was partnering with Facebook Gaming. |
| July 22, 2020 | Mixer service was scheduled to end. |
This was not a sale of Mixer to Facebook or a continuation of Mixer under Facebook ownership. Microsoft discontinued its service and directed partners toward Facebook Gaming as a transition option, as reported by Axios.
Salsamendi’s reasoning was that Microsoft had already made a substantial, multi-year investment in a platform that was spending money without making money and was still far behind Twitch. An independent startup would have found it even harder to raise enough capital to buy time and talent at that scale. He considered the decision painful but economically understandable, while wishing creators had received more advance notice.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What happened to streamers and partners
Microsoft attempted to match existing Mixer partner arrangements through the Facebook Gaming transition, but matching business terms could not guarantee continuity. Creators still had to decide whether Facebook’s audience, policies and long-term direction suited them.
- Followers and subscriptions could not necessarily transfer seamlessly.
- Discoverability and monetization histories were tied to the old platform.
- Smaller streamers lacked the negotiating power and publicity available to stars.
- Communities lost a shared identity, not merely an application.
WIRED’s coverage documented the difficult choices facing creators, while its reporting on livestreaming labor explains why a platform shutdown can affect contracts, income and working lives.
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What “Twitch’s market power” meant
In Salsamendi’s usage, “market power” meant practical dominance and bargaining leverage, not a legal finding. Three ideas should be kept separate:
- Default status: Twitch was the place many serious game streamers expected viewers to find them.
- Contractual leverage: exclusivity provisions could make testing a competitor economically risky.
- Legal monopoly: a formal antitrust conclusion would require current market-definition, share and regulatory analysis that this 2020 interview does not provide.
YouTube’s overall video reach and Facebook’s social distribution are relevant competitors, but they do not make every platform equivalent in live gaming. The historical point is that a technically capable entrant had to overcome Twitch’s accumulated audience and creator liquidity, not merely match its encoding technology.
Why Salsamendi left Microsoft
Salsamendi left Microsoft in 2019, before Mixer closed. In the GeekWire interview, he described a reassessment after his general manager and corporate vice president both departed in October 2019 for separate reasons. Having worked on startups since age 13, he had little experience operating inside a conventional corporate hierarchy, and the leadership changes prompted him to reconsider his own direction.
The available reporting establishes his departure and the Beam-to-Mixer story, but not a sufficiently documented account of every later company or his complete current activities. It is more accurate to stop there than to fill the gap with unverified biography.
The business lesson from Mixer
Mixer demonstrates the difference between product superiority and platform viability. Low latency improved the moments when people interacted, but a platform also needs audience scale, creator supply, discovery, monetization density and credible long-term support. Exclusive talent can buy attention and publicity without creating the everyday network effects that keep ordinary creators and viewers in place.
Microsoft did not abandon Beam immediately; it ran and invested in Mixer for years. The eventual decision was a judgment that additional spending was unlikely to overcome the scale gap quickly enough. That conclusion does not make Mixer’s technology worthless. It shows why a better feature can lose when the incumbent owns the default audience, the discovery habit and much of the creator’s economic security.
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