Google and Yahoo both offered to buy Twitch before Amazon made the winning $970 million all-cash offer.
The Google deal sounded like a sure thing. News sites were so confident the deal was happening, TechCrunch’s startup database CrunchBase had Google listed as the acquirer of the video game live-streaming platform from May until about an hour after the Amazon acquisition was confirmed. (The listing has since been updated.)
Why did the Google acquisition fall through?
Antitrust issues most likely got in the way. Federal antitrust law often stops mergers that consolidate too much of one industry with a single company.
Google was not ableto close the deal, because it was concerned about potential antitrust issues that could have come with the acquisition.
Twitch is Amazon’s largest acquisition to date. Before Twitch, the largest was online shoe shop Zappos, which Amazon acquired for $850 million in 2009.
