When the world fell shut last year, people overwhelming tuned into live plays to connect with others and avoid boredom while trapped in your home. And this pandemic-fueled growth shows no signs of slowing down, even as the world tries to get back into business as usual, with Twitch and Facebook Gaming with a record audience in the first quarter of 2021, according to the last numbers.
Popular live streaming software provider StreamLabs released its first quarterly broadcast industry report for 2021 on Friday. Using data collected by the broadcast analysis company Stream Hatchet from early January to late March, it offers some interesting ideas, most notably the fact that Facebook Gaming closes in on YouTube Gaming for the most popular streaming service number 2. First, there’s Twitch, a long-standing leader , which still easily commands the largest chunk of the market with more than 72% of the total hours of content seen this year.
If (like me) you never got this live, you may be surprised to know how massive the industry is becoming in such a short time. On Twitch, owned by Amazon, the viewer, real-time hours, the average number of simultaneous visits and the number of channels has roughly doubled since that time last year, StreamLabs said. Twitch broke its viewer record for the second consecutive quarter with users viewing 6.3 billion hours of content, an increase of nearly 1 billion hours compared to last quarter. The platform also recorded its largest quarterly increase in hours since the early days of the pandemic, from about 230 million hours to 265 million.
Although Twitch is well known for streaming video games, its most popular category remains “Just Chatting.” This category, considered the successor to the ill-defined “IRL” section of Twitch, which was reconfigured into 13 different non-gaming categories in 2018, involves exactly what the name implies: content where streamers simply stay and chat with viewers or participate in a real way. -world heaters.
“Just Chatting” racked up 754 million hours in the first quarter of this year. To put this figure in perspective, Great car thief V, the most watched game of Twitch in 2021 536.3 million hours, with League of Legends it is not far behind, with 534 million.
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Google-owned Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming continue to lag far behind Twitch, but the gap between them is rapidly narrowing. Facebook hit an impressive milestone this past quarter, surpassing the first billion views for the first time, nearly double the total viewership the platform garnered at that time last year.
“For the first time, we see Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming competing closely with each other in terms of vision,” StreamLabs product chief Ashray Urs said in the report. “Although the audience gap was about 1 billion hours last quarter, this gap has narrowed to 300 million in the first quarter. There is a chance to see Facebook Gaming surpass YouTube Gaming as spectator next quarter. ”
StreamLabs attributes much of this success to PUBG Mobile, The most viewed video game category on Facebook Gaming for at least the past two years. Users viewed 254 million hours of PUBG Mobile live flows in the first quarter, an impressive 76% year-on-year increase. Facebook absorbs games Microsoft’s live streaming platform mixer Last summer undoubtedly attracted a lot of new talent and spectators who migrated.
YouTube Gaming was the only platform of the big three to experience a decline in viewing this quarter, with a decline of 28.6%, from 1.92 billion hours to 1.37 billion hours. Both the total number of hours broadcast and the unique channels also fell, although not as much (6.7% and 9.9% respectively). However, given its year-on-year growth, YouTube Gaming doesn’t seem to do that by half, as its total viewing and average simultaneous viewing increased by about 28%. The platform also hosts the most popular female series transmitter of all platforms: Valkyrae, whose content viewers watched for 12.2 million hours during the first quarter of this year.
We’ve contacted Twitch, Google, and Facebook for feedback, and we’ll be sure to update this blog when we hear about it.
All in all, it seems that the attention of the real-time transmission platforms attracted during the pandemic is not fading soon, even when the closures stop, vaccinations occur and people start traveling away from home. more regularly. But it remains to be seen whether Facebook and YouTube’s live game streaming services will pose any real threat to the Twitch industry’s dominance.