Ninja just signed a multi-year contract that keeps him exclusive to Amazon-owned Twitch

• In August 2019, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins announced a precedent-setting deal to leave Amazon's Twitch streaming platform and exclusively stream on Microsoft's Mixer. Ninja reportedly earned as much as $30 million from the Mixer deal.
• Then, this past June, Microsoft announced the sudden closure of Mixer – making Ninja a free agent once again.
• In the time since, Ninja has streamed sporadically on both YouTube and Twitch. But this week, he announced a multi-year exclusivity deal with Twitch that will keep him exclusive to Amazon's wildly popular service.
• The terms of the deal are unknown.

Amazon's Twitch is getting back one of its biggest stars: Tyler "Ninja" Blevins is returning to the service with a multi-year exclusivity contract, Blevins announced on Thursday.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Blevins previously left Twitch for Microsoft's now-defunct Mixer service, where he was reportedly paid in the ballpark of $30 million for his exclusivity to the platform. That service was shuttered suddenly earlier this summer, making him and other high-profile streamers Microsoft had paid into free agents once again.

In the months since, Blevins has popped up on both Google-owned YouTube and Amazon-owned Twitch to stream games. When asked where he would end up by viewers, he has demurred.

"I really took my time to decide which platform was best," Blevins said in the announcement, "and Twitch has been very supportive throughout this process and understanding my overall career goals."

Amazon's Twitch is the most popular live video streaming service by a large margin.

Like Google-owned YouTube dominates internet video-on-demand, such is Twitch's dominance of live-streamed internet video. Millions of people are watching live videos streams on Twitch at any moment.

Until his departure in 2019, Blevins was Twitch's most popular streamer.

In an effort to compete with Amazon, Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars on two particularly high-profile exclusivity deals with the two highest-profile streamers: Blevins and Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek.

Then, on June 22, Microsoft suddenly announced plans to close Mixer. The service shuttered on July 22, and any existing streamers were re-routed to Facebook Gaming, the social network's own Twitch rival. As of Thursday's announcement, both Blevins and Grzesiek have since returned to Twitch.

Going forward, beyond playing "Fortnite" live on streams, Blevins said his focus will be "to elevate and bring more eyes to underrepresented creators.

His first Twitch stream under the new deal went live on Thursday afternoon, featuring the game "Fall Guys," and had nearly 100,000 viewers as of the time of publishing.

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