Microsoft and Beam announced the acquisition today, and Beam will become part of the Xbox “family.” Beam built its business in response to the growing demand of watching others play games popularized by YouTube and Twitch but given crowdsourced controls allows viewers more interaction with the person actually playing.
Microsoft didn’t have to look far for Beam
The Redmond, WA-based Microsoft needed only to look to the nearby city of Seattle in order to find Beam’s headquarters where the game streaming company does its work. The company won TechCrunch’s Statup Battlefield competition earlier this year at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY event after it clearly impressed the judges with the interactive nature of its streaming service which allows, for example, those following along to load the players weapons in multiplayer games, or assign the gamer additional tasks within the game.
According to an announcement from Microsoft the company “remains committed to its mission of importing users and streamers across platforms.” Beam only launched in early January of this year and has already been incorporated in to the Microsoft Xbox team. No financial terms of the deal were announced today by either company presumably by mutual agreement.
Beam CEO Matt Salsamendi wrote Darrell Etherington of Tech Crunch an email which said that the young company was excited about the move to the Xbox division.
“I’m really excited about Xbox’s focus on community,” the email read according to Etherington. “Beam is fundamentally built on a connected group of passionate individuals that love gaming, and Xbox is super in tune with that.”
Additionally, the Beam CEO wrote a blog post from the company’s website detailing the decision. “Right now it’s business as usual!” Salsamendi wrote in discussing what comes next for Beam “We just launched three brand new interactive integrations and we’ll continue to focus on making the Beam platform an awesome place for gaming communities that want to interact with their audience.”
On the surface, it certainly looks a good fit for both companies with the expected integration of Beam and Microsoft’s Minecraft as well was using its purchase to stream its Let’s Play videos using Beam’s platform to further engage the young players of the latter.
