The Chinese company Tencent apparently wants to enter the streaming business. Streamers starting on the platform Trovo are expected to receive hefty financial injections. The Trovo platform is reminiscent of the market leader Twitch.
What is Trovo? Trovo Live is a new streaming service based in the USA. The still very young platform is in beta and does not have a large audience.
It is backed by the Chinese giant Tencent. Tencent is known for acquiring stakes in gaming developers:
- Riot Games, the developers of League of Legends, fully belong to Tencent
- Tencent also partially owns Grinding Gear Games, the developers of Path of Exile or Funcom, who developed Secret World Legends.
Now it seems Tencent wants to enter streaming as well and shows no reservations about who they want to learn from. Anyone looking at the layout of Trovo’s homepage and game overview will surely notice some similarities with Twitch.
What does Trovo promise to streamers? Currently, the highest viewer numbers are in the low hundreds, which is negligible compared to other platforms, but this is expected to change.
Tencent has given the streaming service a financial boost of $30 million, which is intended to attract new streamers to the platform. The entire sum is to be used for this purpose.
To attract new streamers, Trovo has established the “Creator Partnership Program.” 500 streamers who stream on the platform and meet certain viewer and hour requirements will receive payments ranging from $600 to $4,200.
Additionally, there will be other bonuses based on growth speed and ranking. New streamers can earn up to about $5,000 in total.
It remains to be seen how many streamers can be attracted to a new platform. However, for prominent stream personalities like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins or Michael “shroud” Grzesiek, who made millions with Mixer deals, these sums will likely be unattractive.
Twitch maintains a strong position
Tencent’s investment is an interesting move considering that Twitch has held an undisputed leading position in streaming for years.
Microsoft had already suffered a defeat in this area. In 2019, the company made million-dollar deals with major streamers like Ninja and shroud, who were contracted for exclusive streaming on the Mixer platform.
However, this did not have the desired effect and did not provide Mixer with a growth boost. On the contrary. On June 22, Microsoft announced that Mixer would be shut down.
Twitch has recorded nearly 100% annual growth, excluding non-gaming content such as “Just Chatting”:
It remains to be seen what strategy Tencent will pursue with the streaming service Trovo. However, it is unlikely that the $30 million investment will be the end of it.
