Amazon Said To Be Close To Acquiring Twitch, Not Google [Update]

Amazon gets it: you like gaming. They've got a new phone with some really interesting gaming angles (pun intended), and have their own in-house game development studio. A new report suggests Amazon is close to acquiring Twitch, which lets gamers share footage of their play to the world.

If you were thinking "wrong, Google acquired Twitch", you'd be in the party of many others. While the news (not long ago, either) was that Google was close to acquiring Twitch, they never actually did so. That left Twitch open to other offers, and it seems Amazon may be in the mix, now. It's not clear if Google is still bidding for Twitch.

Aside from their snazzy new phone, Amazon also has a set-top box that can handle some impressive gaming, too. Though the Fire TV can handle pretty robust games, it's not a dedicated console.

This rumor is interesting because Google's YouTube seemed a more comfortable fit for Twitch, and was where the streaming service for gamers was believed to end up, especially since they shut down their parent company and begun exporting data to YouTube. Amazon would likely keep Twitch whole, though, and not cobble it with another service. Depending on what the team at Twitch want for the future of their service to be (and, you know, money), Amazon may actually be the more attractive offer.

Still, the source of this rumor has been very off before on more than one occasion, so we're throwing a lot of shade on this one. Until we get an official announcement from Twitch, it's still a lot of innuendo.

Update: All the talk of Amazon or Google acquiring Twitch has given us a conclusion. Amazon has announced they'l be buying Twitch for close to $1 billion. The deal will see Amazon purchase Twitch stock, which equates to roughly $970 million in an all-cash deal. The deal will close later this year. My shade thrown on this rumor is removed, and we'll chime in later today with what this move means for all of us.

Source: The Information