The most-watched, and streamed, video game in the world did not exist one month ago. The biggest releases in April are remakes of games made in 1997 and 1999. And all of this is to say, there are millions of people stuck at home playing, watching, and streaming a lot of games right now. Our Twitch data has been lighting up, and as the self-quarantine goes on for longer, the numbers for the Amazon ($AMZN) owned website/platform grow by the hour.
But first, let's get to some comparisons with a pair of sequels from Capcom ($TYO:9697).
The Resident Evil 2 remake came out January 2019, and the follow-up came out only a week ago. Both titles had a big splash when they released, seeing almost 300K viewers on the first day.
RE2 almost had 7K individual people stream the game on launch day, and RE3 had nearly 6K itself last week.
Today, the Final Fantasy VII Remake came out from Square Enix ($TYO:9684)and already is the fifth most concurrently watched game on Twitch (as of the time of this writing). It's hovering at 200K viewers and almost 7K streamers. It's almost enough to topple stalwarts like Minecraft and League of Legends (perennial top five games on Twitch), but couldn't beat out the new king of Twitch...
...which happens to be a completely new game that has not officially released to the public as of yet. Valorant, a new first-person shooter, is in closed beta, which means you can't playtest it without a code to enter. At any given point over the last week, it averaged 1.5 million daily viewers with only 5K streamers playing the game.
It's very possible the reason it's #1 right now is the fact that very few people can get their hands on it, which means curious eyeballs go straight to Twitch, and it's a brand new game from a famous development studio, Riot ($PRIVATE:RIOTGAMES). But we'll keep tracking the data as long as new games come out and break records like this.
Also, April was supposed to be the month we all got to play Cyberpunk 2077. Never forget.
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.
Further Reading:
- Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 controller and delayed some games
- Why is Epic Games slowing its hiring to a crawl?
- Nintendo Switch prices at Amazon soar 62% as price gougers prey on desperate shoppers