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MOBA: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
FPS: First Person Shooter
TIME: Third Person Shooter
Twitch, it is a platform for streaming video games and esports but not only! Thus, in February 2019, the major national debate organized by the government also took place on this platform in order to reach a younger audience. You can find our study from the big debate here:
Despite the arrival of competitors like Facebook Gaming, between August 2015 and March 2019, Twitch's average audience more than doubled. In March 2019, Twitch had an average of 1.2M viewers every day with a peak of 4M in one day in August 2018, in particular thanks to a larger audience that came to see a boxing match between Paul Logan and KSI, content hacked from YouTube.
But what game is dominating Twitch today? What are the dynamics of video game genres? Is it easy to become a game watched on Twitch? The objective of my analysis is not to observe the peak of viewers at a given moment but to Watch the regularity of the various video games, that's why I was interested in Average number of viewers per day over a month and by video games on the platform. This metric, publicly available in the Twitch API, allows you to weight launch phenomena, one-off competition or other.
Many games have been Top 1. This is mainly the case when a new game is launched, such as the World of Warcraft expansion, or even the new Call of Duty. However, few of them managed to register for the long term and to be Top 1 for an entire month.
If we analyze these 44 months on Twitch, 4 games were Top 1 but League Of Legends and Fornite left nothing but crumbs with 42 of the 44 Top 1. The two “guests” are two Battle Royale games: PUBG and recently, Apex Legends.
League of Legends shows an impressive consistency in the average number of viewers for a game launched in 2009. 1Er A game on Twitch from August 2015 to February 2018 (interspersed by a PUBG Top 1), MOBA lost its place to Fortnite in March 2018. Nearly a year of dominance of the Battle Royale genre on Twitch followed with 11 months of Fortnite and 1 month of Apex Legends, but League of Legends has regained its pole position since March 2019.
Despite a clear dominance of the MOBA style (League of Legends, Dota 2, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storms) and Battle Royale (H1Z1, PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends) in the TOP 1, it's the genre” First Person Shooter ” which was most often present in the top 10 games with the most average viewers per month on Twitch.
Behind this genre, we find a regular at the top rankings on Twitch with CS: GO but also Overwatch, Destiny or Call of Duty, whose various opuses all made it into the Top 10 at least once.
The “Card Game” genre has long held the top positions with Hearthstone but This one seems to be running out of steam recently on Twitch with 40% fewer viewers compared to 2015. Moreover, February 2019 marked the minimum number of viewers for this genre with a cumulative audience of 30,000 users on Hearthstone, Artifact, Magic, Gwent, Duelyst and Shadowverse.
“While all the signals were green on Twitch, the major publishers did not switch to Battle Royale soon enough”
The Battle Royale mode, initiated by H1Z1 on Twitch, has experienced a meteoric progress on Twitch with an average of 10,000 spectators in 2015 increased to more than 250,000 in 2019. It's interesting to note that each new Battle Royale game cannibalized a portion of the audience from the previous games and dethroned them. This is the case between PUBG and H1Z1 but also Fortnite and PUBG when the game reached the Top 1 for the first time.
However, Apex Legends, which managed to make a record month in February 2019, did not replace Fortnite as the leader in Battle Royale mode on Twitch. This genre, despite cannibalizing the audience between each game, is attracting more and more followers.
My conclusions
Twitch viewership has more than doubled in 3 years and a half. She continues to be a fan of games MOBA despite a slight increase in audience (+11%) but also FPS (+23%).
Les card games seem to have tired audiences on Twitch, it's one of the only game genres that has Lost audience.
It is especially the Battle Royale mode that increased traffic on Twitch with now the largest cumulative audience for this genre of games (+1700% in 3 years). Between August 2015 and February 2017, the audience of this genre increased by 3 but no major publisher had yet released or planned a game on this genre, giving way to independent publishers. We had to wait until the end of 2018 to see this genre on Call of Duty and then February 2019 for EA to release a purely Battle Royale game. While all the signals were green on Twitch, the major publishers didn't make the switch soon enough..
