Fewer and fewer people are watching game streams on the major platforms, with Twitch is losing viewers due to its intrusive advertising system.
Not only have people spent less money on video games this year; they also spent less time watching video game streams.
New research has found that cumulative hours spent watching game streams across all major platforms — Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming — dropped significantly in the spring compared to the start of the year.
In the three months ending March 2022, they had accumulated approximately 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 serious, as game streams totaled 8.99 billion hours watched – meaning the numbers have fallen by 18.1% since then.
It’s not just the ratings either; people also stream less. Streamers broadcast 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 include data for each individual platform.
Twitch easily remains the most popular of the three platforms, both in terms of people watching and streaming, but the total hours watched for this quarter has fallen from 6.13 billion hours last quarter to 5.64 billion hours now.
YouTube Gaming, meanwhile, is the most consistent, holding steady at 1.13 billion hours viewed since the beginning of the year. Although the ratings are down 13.1% from last year when it totaled 1.3 billion hours.
Facebook Gaming has been hit the hardest. In addition to being the least popular platforms, viewing hours have fallen by 28% since last quarter and by 51% since last year.
There’s probably no reason at all for these stats, but we can make some safe assumptions, especially since they closely match the decline seen in actual video game sales.
For starters, there was a noticeable lack of major releases from April to June. Not only that, very little had been announced or watched, so there wasn’t much news to look forward to or speculate about.
This is best evidenced by the fact that the most popular streaming category in those months was just chat, where streamers just talk to their audiences instead of playing games.
That category alone amounted to 828 million hours, with Grand Theft Auto 5 comes in second with 465 million hours.
There’s also the problem that people are less likely to watch streams as lockdown restrictions are eased. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, streams were one of the few forms of free entertainment available to those in lockdown, so what we’re seeing could be more of a return to normalcy.
Twitch has also come under fire for the way it displays ads. As in, they are frustrating often. You can now encounter multiple ads in a row, even while watching a single stream, and that is becoming increasingly frustrating for viewers.
Not only does this stop people from watching live, but it also encourages them to look into ways to block them altogether, via third-party extensions. “How to block Twitch ads” is a popular search topic, with many explanatory articles aimed at frustrated fans.
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