By Samson Lancaster – Editor-in-Chief
Amazon confirmed today that it will be buying video game livestreaming service Twitch for $970 million. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2014. This confirmation comes after several reports claimed that Amazon would be buying Twitch for more than $1 billion. Before all of this, we all thought Google / YouTube would be buying Twitch.
“Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month — from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming conferences like E3. And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old … Like Twitch, we obsess over customers and like to think differently, and we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.” – Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com
“Amazon and Twitch optimize for our customers first and are both believers in the future of gaming … Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently. This change will mean great things for our community, and will let us bring Twitch to even more people around the world.” – Twitch CEO Emmett Shear.
I love Amazon, great deals and services for the right prices. Twitch, is really cool too, though there interfaces suck hard, especially their mobile apps. Hopefully Amazon will come in and fix some of their shitty UI problems. If anyone knows how to get users what they want, when they want it, it’s Amazon. I look forward to seeing Amazon’s big bucks backing Twitch, and some change for the better.
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