Late yesterday we reported the surprising news that Amazon would be buying Twitch instead of Google. We have a follow-up to that report. It turns out that the rumors of Google attempting to buy Twitch were true. In fact, Google was going to paying over $1Billion for the company which would have been more than Amazon's final bid of $970 Million.
The reason why Google backed out of the deal was because they became concerned about anti-trust issues. Ultimately, Google was worried that the U.S. Government Anti-trust regulators would have a problem with the fact that Google also owns YouTube with its own streaming gaming services. Due to these concerns, Google and Twitch couldn't come up with a workable "breakup" deal, and so the whole effort was scrapped.
Source: Forbes