Amazon to buy Twitch in $970m deal

Retail giant Amazon has agreed to buy Twitch for $970m in cash.

The retail giant swoops in for the firm, which was widely believed to have been an acquisition target for Google.

Twitch is a major live-streaming platform for games, and one that has benefited hugely from eSports. It is integrated into both PS4 and Xbox One and is the biggest video platform for games in the world. In July alone, Twitch claims it had 55m unique visitors watching some 15 billion minutes of video. Video that has been produced by around 1m broadcasters.

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,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

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.”

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear added: 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 opened a UK office this year, and was also live-streaming partner for E3 and pretty much every event at Gamescom.

The deal is expected to be finalised during the next four months.