Last year, noted man with godlike aiming skills Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek was among a handful of top Twitch stars who shocked viewers by departing the Amazon-owned platform for Microsoft’s Mixer. In June of this year, Mixer suddenly died. Now, after a couple months of silence, Grzesiek is returning to Twitch.
Grzesiek spent the past couple weeks teasing on Twitter, which culminated in an announcement trailer today.
“I’m coming home,” he wrote, also posting a link to his Twitch channel.
According to a press release received by Kotaku, Grzesiek has struck an exclusive deal with the platform. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is likely quite lucrative. For comparison’s sake, sources told Kotaku earlier this year that while Mixer was not paying Grzesiek as much as Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who was said to be making somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million per year, he was in a similar ballpark, also pulling in millions per year. That said, the streaming business has shifted in recent times. After Mixer shook things up only to ultimately fail, exclusive contracts are no longer in vogue—even with the streaming business booming while covid-19 ravages other industries.
Blevins, who kicked off the trend of big-name streamers moving to Mixer, has yet to announce his new home. In July, he did a test stream on YouTube, which peaked at over 160,000 concurrent viewers. Last week, he tried a similar experiment on Twitch.
For now, Twitch has one of its biggest stars back. Grzesiek has yet to announce the exact timing of his return stream, but according to the press release, it will take place “very soon.”