About $10 million has been invested in one of Twitch’s central competitors in the mobile gaming streaming market.
TechCrunch IT blog wrote about this with reference to its sources, but without official confirmation the other day.
Compared to the $970 million that Amazon paid for Twitch last year, that’s not much. However, Mobcrush, namely, investors, one of whom was the Kleiner Perkins venture fund, invested a “dozen”, and without solid injections, it has already managed to light up in the mobile arena. Another thing is that it is not entirely clear whether it will be able to compete with Twitch when the latter fully comes to mobile platforms.
In other words, it all depends on how long an Amazon-owned company will delay coming to mobile. If Twitch waits another year or two, Mobcrush has a chance to grab the mobile market for itself. Now the service is still “getting back on its feet”, being in the beta stage.
In the spring, when the service was in closed beta mode, the number of its users numbered about five thousand. Now, most likely, this number is much higher. His top videos easily gain more than 10 thousand views. Moreover, for example, the popular streamer BenTimm1 gained more than 100 thousand views.
To strengthen its position, Mobcrush not only raises investments (by the way, the mentioned transfer was already the second in a year, $ 5 million was invested in the stream service in the spring), but also hires veterans of Apple, Google and Microsoft. A month ago, the company hired former App Store game lead Greg Essing, former Google Play game lead Koh Kim and Xbox PR Eric Doty.
The only question that has not yet been answered is whether mobile streaming will be as popular as desktop/console streaming. There are not so many games that make sense to watch – at the moment there are not so many in mobile, and watching someone pick tomatoes from the garden is not the most exciting activity.
Now, using Mobcrush, you can stream only from Apple devices, but the developers promise support for Android and Windows.