Twitch and YouTube Gaming viewer figures plummet as summer video game drought continues
Less and less people are watching gaming streams across the major platforms, with Twitch losing viewers due to its obtrusive ad system.
People haven’t just been spending less money on video games this year; they’ve also spent less time watching video game streams.
New research has revealed that the cumulative hours spent watching gaming streams across all the major platforms – Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming – decreased significantly throughout the spring, compared to the beginning of the year.
For the three months ending March 2022, they had accrued around 8.06 billion hours. But between April and June 2022, that had dropped by 8.4% to 7.36 billion hours.
Compared to April to June last year, it’s even more severe, as gaming streams managed a total of 8.99 billion hours watched – meaning figures have decreased by 18.1% since then.
It’s not just the viewing figures either; people are also streaming less. Streamers broadcasted 220 million hours of content across all platforms this quarter, 30 million less than the previous quarter and 53 million less compared to last year.
These figures were compiled by Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet, which also includes data for each individual platform.
Twitch remains easily the most popular of the three platforms, both in terms of people watching and streaming, but its total hours watched for this quarter has dropped from 6.13 billion hours last quarter to 5.64 billion hours now.
YouTube Gaming, meanwhile, is the most consistent, remaining at a steady 1.13 billion hours watched since the start of the year. Although viewing figures have declined by 13.1% compared to last year, when it totalled 1.3 billion hours.
Facebook Gaming has been hit the worst. Aside from being the least popular of the
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