As the world went downhill last year, people overwhelming adjusted in streaming streams to connect with others and avoid boredom while stuck in their homes. And this pandemic-fueled growth is showing no signs of slowing, even as people try to return to business as usual, both Twitch and Facebook Gaming saw records in the first quarter of 2021, according to the most recent numeral.
Popular streaming program provider StreamLabs released its first quarterly report for the streaming industry on Friday. Using data compiled by the flow analysis firm Stream Hatchet from early January to late March, provides some interesting information, especially the fact that Facebook Gaming is approaching the YouTube Gaming site for the most popular streaming service. # 2. easily orders the largest piece on the market, with over 72% of the total content hours watched this year.
If (like me) you have never been able to stream this, you may be surprised at how massive the industry has become in such a short time. At Amazon’s Twitch, viewers, hours, average viewing times and number of channels have doubled since last year, StreamLabs said. Twitch broke the viewing record for the second consecutive quarter, with users watching 6.3 billion hours of content, an increase of almost 1 billion hours compared to the last quarter. The platform also saw the largest quarterly increase in hours transmitted since the beginning of the pandemic, from about 230 million hours to 265 million.
While Twitch is best known for streaming video games, its most popular category continues to be “Just Chatting.” This category – considered the successor to the poorly defined “IRL” section defined by Twitch, which was reconfigured into 13 distinct game categories in 2018 – involves exactly what the name implies: content in which streamers simply chat with viewers or gets involved in reality – Lucians from the world.
“Just Chatting” accumulated 754 million hours watched in Q1 this year. To put this figure into perspective, Grand Theft Auto V, the most watched game on Twitch in 2021, had 536.3 million hours, with League of Legends not far from 534 million.
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Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming, owned by Google, continue to lag far behind Twitch, but the gap between them is narrowing rapidly. Facebook reached an impressive milestone in the last quarter, exceeding one billion hours watched for the first time, almost double the total number of views the platform received during this period last year.
“For the first time, we see Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming competing closely with each other in terms of viewers,” StreamLabs chief Ashray Urs said in a report. “While the viewing gap was about 1 billion hours in the last quarter, this gap narrowed to about 300 million in the first quarter. There is a chance that we will see that Facebook Gaming will overtake YouTube Gaming in the last quarter. ”
StreamLabs attributes much of this success PUBG Mobile, The most watched category of Facebook Gaming games in the last two years. Users tracked 254 million hours of PUBG Mobile livestreams in the first quarter, an impressive increase from 76% year-on-year. Facebook Absorption of games Microsoft’s live streaming platform failed 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 see a decline in viewers this quarter, down 28.6% from 1.92 billion hours to 1.37 billion hours. Both the total number of hours broadcast and the single channels also decreased not so much (6.7% and 9.9% respectively). However, given the year-over-year growth, YouTube Gaming doesn’t seem to be half bad, as the total number of views and the competing media both increased by about 28%. The platform also hosts the most popular female streamer on all platforms: Valkyrae, whose content viewers watched 12.2 million hours in the first quarter of this year.
We have contacted Twitch, Google and Facebook for comments and we will be sure to update this blog when we hear.
However, it seems that the attention of the real-time transmission platforms transmitted during the pandemic is not going out soon, even when the blockages are lifted, vaccines are launched and people start leaving their homes again more regularly. But whether live streaming games on Facebook and YouTube will ever pose a real threat to the Twitch industry’s dominance remains to be seen.