Twitch, the video streaming platform Amazon ($AMZN) owns, is set to have a banner year. The tragedy and crisis of Covid-19 has a silver lining for a handful of businesses and industries (if you find any solace in that). Video game sales will skyrocket as more gamers work from home and sneak in some extra hours when the boss isn't looking. And with that, more gamers will be watching and streaming more games.
Twitch is already breaking records, and with a bevy of new games coming down the pike (Doom Eternal, Animal Crossing New Horizon, Nioh 2, Resident Evil 3, Final Fantasy VII Remake, The Last of Us Part II, etc.) expect to see higher numbers across the board.
This is a total reflection of the number of people watching Twitch every twelve hours. You can see it not only bounce up and down erratically, but overall the last five years have seen an increase in daily average viewership. While it's hard to break things down into percentages, you can see that years ago the average high in any given week was a million viewers. The last few months have gotten close to, or broken, an average of two million easy.
If we zoom into the last three months, the increase in viewers is more noticeable. Late February was when things got to over two million consistently every day, and we'll keep monitoring the Twitch data to see if April can top March, and if all those new game releases can vault viewership to unseen averages like three million a day.
On average, over the last month, here are the top ten most-streamed video games and their daily viewers:
|
Name |
Category Rank (Avg) |
|---|---|
|
League of Legends |
84.58K |
|
Just Chatting |
69.03K |
|
Fortnite |
45.86K |
|
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive |
40.90K |
|
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare |
38.53K |
|
Grand Theft Auto V |
33.93K |
|
DOTA 2 |
26.40K |
|
Escape From Tarkov |
26.27K |
|
Apex Legends |
18.26K |
|
Hearthstone |
15.44K |
If you're wondering about what the "Just Chatting" video game is, it's not a game. It's literally just people talking, whether that be to the audience, chat, or on a podcast.
Every night “just chatting” spikes as hundreds of thousands of viewers look to just hang out with others. And considering what's going on with the world today, that seems like a good way to vent or share stories or just listen to people complain about the meta in Overwatch.
League of Legends, despite its perennial popularity, has seen a slight decline in viewership in recent weeks, especially in comparison to “Just Chatting”. That people are spending less time watching the game and just talking to one another means a lot, considering LoL has been the most popular game in the world for a while.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.