The battle for streaming superstars is hotting up as YouTube poaches 3 gamers from Amazon's Twitch
- YouTube has recruited three prominent streamers from Twitch, its Amazon-owned rival, as it looks to boost its hold on the streaming market.
- Rachell "Valkyrae" Hofstetter, Elliott "Muselk" Watkins and Lannan "LazarBeam" Eacott will now stream content exclusively for YouTube.
- The trio has a combined following of more than 21 million on YouTube, having already established a presence on the site. Their combined following on Twitch at the time of the deal stood at more than 1.5 million subscribers.
- It's bad news for Amazon's Twitch, which landed high-profile game streamers but has been steadily bleeding big names to YouTube and Microsoft streaming service Mixer.
- Business Insider has contacted YouTube and Twitch for comment.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
YouTube has pulled off a major coup after signing over three major streamers from Twitch.
Rachell "Valkyrae" Hofstetter, Elliott "Muselk" Watkins, and Lannan "LazarBeam" Eacott will now stream content exclusively for YouTube having previously broadcast to Amazon's Twitch.
The trio has a combined following of more than 21 million on YouTube, having already established a presence on the site, primarily through uploads of themselves playing video games.
Their combined following on Twitch at the time of the deal stood at over 1.5 million.
Valkyrae is known for her "Fortnite" streams, and boasts close to 1 million Twitch followers, while Muselk first made his name as a YouTuber than a Twitch streamer, and boasts more than 12.3 million YouTube followers.
LazarBeam is also well-known for "Fortnite" videos on YouTube, and is the eighth-biggest YouTube channel overall in terms of views.
Although Twitch holds the lion's share of the live streaming market - accounting for 61% of hours spent watching streams in December 2019 - rival services are slowly loosening that hold.
According to a study by Stream Elements and Arsenal.gg, YouTube accounted for 27.9% of all hours watched in the same month while Facebook Gaming - which launched in 2018 - took up 8.5%. The other 2.6% went to Microsoft-owned Mixer.
The news of the Twitch departures comes as the Amazon service bleeds creators to rival services. Since August, Twitch has lost big names such as Tyler "Ninja" Blevins and Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek, among others.
Founded in 2011, Twitch was bought by Amazon back in 2014 for $970 million - despite YouTube having reportedly been in late-stage talks to buy Twitch itself.
Business Insider has contacted Twitch for comment.