The gaming industry experienced an uptick in engagement in 2020 as a direct result of lockdowns during the Coronavirus. Video game streaming platform, Twitch, enjoyed its strongest year and the numbers from the first half of 2021 show that the momentum from the previous year has carried over.
In this sense, based on figures by TwitchTracker, the total number of hours watched on the streaming platform Twitch from March 2021- June 2021 amounted to 8.69 billion. This represents a 35.84% progress from the same period in 2020, the four months immediately after the outbreak of the pandemic.
The highest number of average concurrent viewers within the same reporting period from 2020 was set in April 2020, with 2.49 million viewers. All four months of the reporting period in 2021 registered a higher average concurrent viewer count than that of April 2020. For instance, April 2021 registered the highest average, with an estimated 3.11 million viewers.
STREAMERS ALSO ON THE RISE
The number of hours streamed also grew by a significant amount one year from the virus. From March to June 2021, a total of 325.69 million hours were streamed on Twitch compared to just 258.91 million in 2020, a 25.79% increase.
In 2021, there was an average of 9.07 million active streamers per month in the four-month reporting period of March-June compared to 6.71 million for the same period in 2020. May 2020 had the highest number of active streamers, with 7.4 million, while all four months within the reporting period in 2021 showed higher indicators. The highest figure was set in March 2021, when Twitch recorded 9.6 million active streamers.