The most successful Super Smash Bros. for Wii U player of all time, Gonzalo "ZeRo" Barrios, is the latest popular livestreamer to leave Twitch.
ZeRo announced Monday that he is entering an exclusive streaming rights deal with Facebook. He makes the platform jump after building a fruitful content career that included an audience of more than 520,000 followers Twitch as well as 820,000 subscribers to his video-on-demand content on YouTube.
ZeRo will continue to produce content for YouTube but will stream on Facebook beginning Monday.
The 24-year-old Chilean, who retired from pro play in favor of content creation, is the latest streamer to move in a battle between five major streaming platforms: Amazon-owned Twitch, Google-owned YouTube, Microsoft-backed Mixer, Facebook and Caffeine, the last of which received $100 million in investment from the Fox Corporation in September 2018.
This fall, Mixer made two major moves, acquiring exclusive streaming rights for popular esports pros-turned-influencers Tyler "Ninja" Blevins and Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek. Weeks later, YouTube announced it had signed Jack "CouRage" Dunlop, a former esports caster who became a successful livestreamer on Twitch. In October and November, Facebook picked up rights for Hearthstone content creator Jeremy "Disguised Toast" Wang, and Caffeine added Migos rapper Offset to its lineup of creators.
ZeRo's following on Twitch ranked 272nd overall on the website and averaged roughly 2,000 concurrent viewers per livestream in the last three months, according to stream statistics website TwitchTracker.
Prior to becoming a full-time content creator, ZeRo competed in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and before that, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Brawl. In the beginning of Smash for Wii U's competitive tenure, ZeRo racked up 56 consecutive tournament wins and became the consensus best player in the game. The Panda Global Top 100 Rankings for Smash for Wii U ranked him as the best player to ever play the game, even after he moved away from competitive.