Twitch and Facebook Gaming Continue to See Growth in September
According to Rainmaker, StreamElements’ analytics partner, both Twitch and Facebook Gaming experienced year-over-year growth in September. Although neither platform increased their hours watched compared to August, they both showed improvement compared to the same period last year.
In September, Twitch saw a slight decline of five percent month-over-month, with approximately 1.7 billion hours watched compared to 1.9 billion in August. Similarly, Facebook Gaming also experienced a slight dip, but still maintained over 500 million hours watched for the third consecutive month. This decrease in numbers could be attributed to the return of kids and teenagers to school towards the end of August.
New World Surges in Popularity on Twitch
Amazon Games’ new massively multiplayer online game, New World, made its way into the top 10 most-watched games on Twitch last month. It accumulated over 39 million hours watched, with a peak of 13 million hours watched on the second day of its release. While the rest of the top 10 games remained steady, five of them experienced double-digit decreases in viewership during September.
ASMR Category Shows Consistent Growth on Twitch
ASMR is the only major category on Twitch that consistently grew month-over-month in 2021. It started with just over 4 million hours watched in January and reached over 12 million hours watched last month, according to Rainmaker. Among ASMR streamers, Amouranth stood out with over 3 million hours watched, while no other streamer in the top 10 surpassed 1 million hours watched.
Throughout September, xQc maintained his position as the most-watched streamer on Twitch with just under 20 million hours watched. The biggest jump in rankings came from Junichi “kato_junichi0817” Kato, a popular Japanese streamer for Apex Legends. He went from spot 65 to the top 10 most-watched channels, accumulating 7.7 million hours watched compared to his previous 2.3 million hours watched.