Mildom

» see mildom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Five hundred yen an hour, up to four hours a day. That was the offer Mildom made to ordinary streamers, and in a market where everyone else paid you a cut of whatever your viewers chose to give you, an hourly rate for sitting in front of a camera was a strange thing to put on a landing page.

Mildom launched on 25 September 2019, run by DouYu Japan, a joint venture set up the month before between the Chinese streaming giant DouYu and Mitsui & Co. The product was shaped like Twitch and the strategy was Chinese: spend money on supply first, assume the audience follows the people. Early on it worked well enough to be noticed. Yoshimoto Kogyo comedians appeared on it, and broadcasters came across from Niconico and OPENREC.tv, which were the homegrown platforms Mildom actually had to beat.

What it could not buy was permission. In March 2020 Cygames prohibited its titles from being streamed on Mildom. In August 2020 Nintendo blocked playthroughs of its games there after licensing negotiations failed, which in Japan is close to a structural injury for a game streaming service, since the games people most want to watch are the ones Nintendo publishes. Mildom spent the rest of its life as a platform you could not stream Nintendo on.

DouYu Japan announced the closure on 19 August 2024. Coin sales and new registrations stopped on 26 August and the service itself ended at 00:00 on 1 September 2024, with refunds for unspent paid coins taken until 1 November. The stated reason was that providing service at a quality users would be satisfied with had become difficult. mildom.com does not resolve now.

~ the case file ~

~ money for sitting there ~

The hourly system started as two tiers. A small group had contracts as official broadcasters and got paid directly, while everyone else competed in ranked bands for time-based rewards. In August 2022 the company collapsed the distinction and paid every streamer by streaming time, which is the point at which Mildom became, briefly, the only large platform in Japan where a person with twelve viewers still earned something for showing up.

It is also the clearest explanation of the ending. A platform that pays for supply has a cost line that grows with every new streamer and a revenue line that only grows with viewers, and the gap between those two curves is the whole business. I was forty when this closed and not watching Japanese game streams, so I am reading this one off the company's own announcements rather than off anything I lived through.

~ the licensing wall ~

Japanese game publishers treat streaming rights as rights, not as marketing, and they always have. Nintendo in particular has spent two decades deciding case by case who may show its games to an audience, and the decision it made about Mildom in August 2020 was no. A western platform can shrug that off because its library is mostly shooters and live service games whose publishers beg for coverage. In Japan it meant the biggest category of content on the internet was simply unavailable on one service and available on all the others.

~ what a coin was worth ~

Mildom ran on coins, bought with real money and spent on streamers, which is the standard Japanese live streaming economy and also a liability the day you close. The refund window ran from 2 September to 1 November 2024, two months to turn a balance back into yen. Archive Team ran a grab on the site in the weeks around the shutdown, and the capture is held privately on archive.org rather than browsable, so the public record of five years of Japanese streaming now sits behind a door.

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