Watch time on Twitch has remained stable year-over-year, with 18.9bn hours watched in 2023 compared to 18.5bn this year.
StreamElements’ State of the Stream 2024 yearly summary – compiled from data courtesy of Rainmaker.gg – suggests possible reasons for the “lack of growth are creators migrating to other platforms or merely splitting their time with the growing popularity of multistreaming in order to broaden their fanbase.”
Daily hours watched in Q4 are also consistent across the year, with the Q2 dip in hours watched extending throughout the rest of the year.
Interestingly, Twitch’s top 9 games remain essentially unchanged over the last five years, with Grand Theft Auto 5, League of Legends, and Valorant being the first, second, and third most popular games, respectively. CSGO, Fortnite, Dota 2, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty: Warzone round out the rest of the top 10, although the platform’s biggest category remains Just Chatting, with more than twice the hours watched to second-place GTA 5, presumably due to KaiCenat’s subathon.
Despite this, hours watched for League of Legends are down 34% in November, with GTA 5 and Dota 2 dropping 10% and 7%, too. World of Warcraft is up 84% in November 2024, though, and Fortnite up 38%.
KaiCenat – described as a “powerhouse” on the monthly and yearly charts – clocked up 184m hours watched across the year, over twice as much as second place ibai, although StreamElements warns that shouldn’t “overshadow the impressive numbers put up by the other chart members,” with Jynxzi, Caudrel, caseoh_, and Papaplatte all cracking the top 10 of the year for the first time.
Here’s StreamElement’s full breakdown.
“Twitch has shuffled through several top streamers over the years. There was the Ninja era, then xQc’s reign, and now we are in the KaiCenat age,” said Or Perry, CEO of StreamElements.
“The driver behind the changing of the guards is platform diversification. Ninja began multistreaming while xQc is leveraging different platforms for unique content, both of which have remained successful. It’s only a matter of time before KaiCenat tests the water.
“This is because being everywhere that gamers are is the best way to grow, whether you are using some platforms for discovery and others for community building. Expect 2025 to be a big year for multistreaming as the tools evolve and become more accessible to the broader creator ecosystem.”
Twitch’s monthly hours watched “rebounded” back in September, hitting 1.653bn hours watched, up from 1.568bn in June 2024.