Amazon Coughs Up $970 Million for Streaming Site Twitch

Twitch has been acquired for a whopping $970 million – but not by Google as originally anticipated. Instead, it’s mega retailer Amazon that’s coughed up the extraordinary amount of cash required to purchase the streaming site, with its bidding rival purportedly pulling out due to concerns over anti-competition laws.

Exactly what the acquisition will mean for the future of the massively popular site is somewhat unclear at this point in time, but Amazon has been building its gaming presence in recent years, following the purchase of Strider developer Double Helix and the launch of the Amazon Fire TV. And both organisations seem optimistic about the buyout.

“Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community,” said an understandably enthusiastic Twitch CEO Emmett Shear in a statement. “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.”

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos added: “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. We look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.”

For now, then, it seems that fans of the site can very much expect more of the same – but it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a more long-term plan at play here. To be honest, considering the amount of money on the table, we can’t imagine that Amazon will be happy simply streaming games. What do you make of this deal? Gasp at the amount of cash in the comments section below.