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Microsoft’s E3 press conference was the most-viewed Twitch stream ever

e3 2018 press conference viewer numbers

This year’s E3 press conferences provided plenty of memorable moments and cool-looking games, but there’s little denying that Microsoft had everyone beat on sheer volume of interesting stuff. Many of the games they showed were multi-platform – including PC, of course – and that means pretty much everybody had a reason to tune in.

And tune in they did, because the Xbox E3 Briefing (as it’s officially called) drew over 1.7 million viewers when it broadcast on Sunday. That’s a half million more than the year before and, impressively, it’s now the Twitch stream that’s seen the most concurrent views ever.

Keep up on everything that’s on the way with our list of upcoming PC games.

The previous record, set by by the Eleague Boston Major in January 2017 with 1.1 million viewers, was actually broken four times over this E3. Microsoft topped the charts, but Ubisoft followed close behind with 1.6 million viewers and Sony held close with 1.5 million. Fortnite also set its own new record with 1.5 million viewers during the Celebrity Pro-Am tournament. (The slightly less record for an individual streamer’s viewership still stands with Ninja.)

You can get the full numbers in the GitHyp, but rounding out the remainder of presenters at E3 were Bethesda with 964k viewers, the PC Gaming Show with 893k, Nintendo with 679k, and Electronic Arts with 528k. Notably, EA’s presser was the only one to have lost viewers compared to 2017.

Microsoft had plenty of great games to show – we’re still waiting for that Cyberpunk 2077 release date – but there are other factors to its success. It was in a Sunday afternoon time slot, when most of North America was off work and much of Europe was still awake, making it far easier to catch live than some of the other shows. (Microsoft’s heavy promotion of Mixer didn’t seem to have too much effect on the Twitch numbers, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that’s a success or failure on their part.)