Amazon will acquire game streaming service Twitch for approximately $970 million, the companies announced Monday afternoon.
The deal was announced following a summer full of rumors that the streaming service was being acquired by Google for a similar amount.
"Amazon has the same deep, shared vision of where the games industry is going, and saw the same trends that we did. We saw a cultural fit between the two companies, and they saw what we were doing and wanted to help us do it faster," Twitch CEO Emmett Shear told Mashable.
Shear will remain the CEO of Twitch, and the company will become a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon, and he said the company's mission will not change.
"Acquisition was never a goal for Twitch, for us it's very much been a focus on the customers first," Shear said.
Rumors of the acquisition were originally reported by business blog The Information on Monday afternoon.
It was only a few months ago that Google was rumored to be purchasing Twitch for $1 billion, though the rumors had never been confirmed. The Journal said those talks cooled.
Twitch was founded in 2011 as a spinoff of now-shuttered Justin.TV. It has since grown a massive audience with more than 55 million monthly active users, according to the company. It recently rolled out services to flag copyrighted music in its video-on-demand archives, which users pointed to as a sign of a potential acquisition.
The deal will close later in 2014, Twitch said.
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