Mixer co-founder Matt Salsamendi said in an interview this weekend that he agrees with Microsoft’s decision to shut down the game streaming service. What he’s more concerned with are the people who relied on Mixer.

“It’s a big deal for the community that streams every day or relies as a business on what Mixer did,” he told Geekwire. “For a lot of people, there’s a lot of uncertainty. And so if there’s any sadness or frustration on my part, I wish that there was a way to get more of a heads up and notice out there. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to look back and be upset about where it ended up going.”

Salsamendi co-founded a game streaming service called Beam with James Boehm in 2016 when he was just 18 years old. And after Microsoft acquired it later that year, the firm renamed Beam to Mixer in 2017. Microsoft hired Boehm and Salsamendi at that time, but both left the firm in October 2019.

The Geekwire story notes that Salsamendi “agrees with Microsoft’s decision, given the competitive challenges Mixer faced, and the investment it required.”

“The success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the service for them as quickly and broadly as possible,” Microsoft head of Xbox Phil Spencer wrote in the blog post announcing Mixer’s closure. “It became clear that the time needed to grow our own live streaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences we want to deliver to gamers now, so we’ve decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform.” Sadly, that platform is owned by Facebook, one of the most reviled companies in tech.

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