Chinese game live streaming platform Chushou has shut down, the latest casualty in the country’s Tencent-dominated game live streaming market. Live streaming platform Panda TV folded last year.
Chushou received a roughly $77M USD investment from Google in early 2018 and raised a disclosed total of roughly $128M in funding since the platform was established in 2011. Other investors in Chushou included Qiming Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Shunwei Capital, AlphaX Partners, and Baidu’s iQiyi.
Tencent controls the two largest game live streaming platforms in China, Huya and DouYu. Additionally, it operates its self-developed Penguin Esports platform and owns minority stakes in live streaming platforms Bilibili and Kuaishou. According to Bloomberg News, Chushou asked streamers who stream exclusively on the platform to switch to Kuaishou.
In an interview with Surging News in 2019, Li Qiang COO and co-founder of Chushou revealed that the company was close to breaking even while paying tens of millions of yuan a year for esports events media rights. In the same year, the company announced that it expected around ¥600M RMB ($85.5M) in revenues for the year, and its CMO Yang Shuyu talked about Chushou’s willingness to go public in China.
Since then, several Chushou streamers complained about not receiving revenue share payments and at least one influencer agency sued Chushou for breach of contract before the service ceased operations on July 3. An anonymous source told the China-Singapore Jingwei that the platform currently owes several esports organizations up to ¥5M ($713K) and thousands of content creators up to ¥200K ($28.5K).
While Tencent is solidifying its market dominance in China, the company released a new live streaming platform in the West. The service named Trovo closely resembles Amazon-owned live streaming platform Twitch in its appearance and functionality. Tencent-owned Huya pursued a similar strategy with the launch of Nimo TV in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Mexico in 2018.
Outside of China, Mixer is the latest service to surrender to its live streaming platform competition, mainly Twitch, as it will cease business on July 22. The Microsoft-owned platform exclusively signed two previously high-profile Twitch influencers Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and Michael “shroud” Grzesiek.
Source: https://esportsobserver.com/chushou-shuts-down-operations/
