As people around the world while away their time under quarantine or lockdown, they’ve increasingly turned to videogames – as we’ve reported, Steam has broken its own records for concurrent users with each passing weekend lately. But people are also watching a lot more videogames, too: a new report out from Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet shows that the past few months have been busy for the streaming services.
As our sister site The Loadout reports, the last quarter saw Twitch pass the three billion hours watched milestone. If you were to put all those hours together sequentially, it’s about 345,000 years – enough to go back to the dawn of humanity, when the earliest homo sapiens were cruising around Africa without the slightest clue as to what kappa would eventually mean.
The Streamlabs report also says Twitch hit all-time highs this past quarter for hours watched, hours streamed, and for average concurrent viewership. The other big streaming platforms saw their numbers jump, too: YouTube Gaming Live’s average CCV is up 15.5% over the previous quarter, and Facebook Gaming’s average CCV quadrupled its figures from this same quarter last year.
Mixer is the most popular streaming platform that isn’t called Twitch: according to Streamlabs’ numbers, more streamers are using Mixer than both Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming combined, and Mixer is second only to Twitch in number of hours streamed this quarter.
Twitch remains the undisputed big dog in streaming, however. Its quarterly total hours streamed numbers had been in decline in 2019, but the COVID-19 related quarantines have seen those figures come roaring back, with a 20% increase over the previous quarter for an all-time high of 121 million hours from January to March.
Hey, and speaking of Twitch, April’s batch of free games is now available for Twitch Prime members.