Twitch Top 10 Games 2017–1/2
2017 could be called the most eventful year to date for Twitch, and it was clearly the one where it grew the most since receiving Amazon’s mighty pat in the back in 2014. Looking at games numbers, the trends that could be foreseen by observing the past years closely got confirmed in rather spectacular fashion.
Trend #1 is a new genre, “Battle Royale”, seemingly coming out of the blue with astonishing viewership momentum. For the 1st time in 3+ years of collecting Twitch data, the King League of Legends was challenged seriously last summer.
Trend #2 is that the AAA gaming industry can’t find a way: the billionaire studios, the Hollywood of video games, can’t achieve big time success on Twitch… all the while smaller projects ran by smaller studios, or even straight out amateurs, have hit the platform and viewers eyeballs like burning meteors.
Trend #3 is esports. Depending on whether you consider Battle Royale games to be esports material or not, you can say games with significant esports potential are either “dominating the platform heavily” or “absolutely crushing it and barely leaving any crumbs for others”.
If you’d like to learn more, please check the graph below and the following analysis of the Top 10 Twitch games of 2017. In this article, you’ll find games ranked 6–10. In this one I covered the the top 5 titles.
#10 FORTNITE
That one would have been extremely hard to predict just 4 months ago: released in September, Fortnite Battle Royale has followed in the footsteps of PUBG and somewhat widened the latter’s scope by bringing the Battle Royale genre to the console with a more relaxed, cartoony approach. On Twitch the results are very spectacular as the game has been a top 5 regular since late September.
Fortnite appeals to a wide range of gamers, from the hardcore competitive type to more goofy-styled content creators gathering very big audiences looking for fun. All in all, it seems like Fortnite is currently on some kind of launch pad and one can’t really say how high it will end up.
#9 H1Z1
The graph doesn’t show this but I’ll write it down here: most of H1Z1’s Twitch viewership of 2017 happened in Q1, before PUBG was released. To be quick, I’ll be harsh: H1Z1 is a lesser version of PUBG and couldn’t stand the competition once the latter was out. Still, just showing up in this list is a major feat that shouldn’t be overlooked: H1Z1 was the 1st truly successful Battle Royale game.
Also it’s worth noticing H1Z1 is the 2nd “Battle Royale” game in this top 10 ranking… and there’s 1 more left to be covered, PUBG of course, making the “Battle Royale” genre the most represented in this year’s top 10 Twitch games.
#8 WORLD OF WARCRAFT
Even if there was no new expansion released in 2017, Blizzard’s MMO still managed to keep a spot in Twitch’ Top 10. This says a lot about the game’s tremendous interactive storytelling and replayability potential, and quality in general. While Blizzard has been through a few hardships and disappointments in the world of esports and Twitch viewerships lately, WOW can be considered one of the bright surprises of 2017 for the Californian behemoth.
Blizzard didn’t achieve this without new content though. Even if no new paying expansion set was made available last year, a new raid hit the World of Warcraft last November. This raid, as it was well designed and produced by many accounts, generated a noticeable viewership surge in November and December, which helped gather significant chunks of WOW’s fan base in front of live streams.
#7 GTA V
Now that one is to be considered closely. The only “traditional” AAA game in this ranking, GTA V doesn’t exactly owe its recent Twitch surge to its studio or publisher. As you can see on the graph, the game climbed 14 spots year-on-year, by far the biggest bump in our ranking. All the while its Hours Watched grew 250%.
This is due to… a bunch of volunteer coders grouped under the name FiveRP, who have been developing an unofficial “Role Play” mod for the game. In the mod, players have to incarnate their characters and act “for real”, ie Sheriff Eli doing the sheriff.
Since this mod came out, GTA V has become that much more interesting to watch (and maybe to play as well?!… well we don’t have metrics on that part). After several years of rather ineffective “traditional marketing/community” efforts by Rockstar and Take Two, it has taken the imagination and hard work of a bunch of volunteers to get GTA to finally take off on Twitch.
Now the best part of that information is that this “RP mod” is currently illegal to play as it is required logging into a pirate (= not operated by GTA IP owners) server to join the role-playing fun. As it stands, especially considering how aggressive they’ve been towards modders in 2017, Rockstar and Take Two could put an end to the RP mod at anytime… and kick GTA V out of Twitch’ Top 10.
#6 OVERWATCH
The 6th spot on Twitch is something very hard to achieve. But when we’re talking about Overwatch, the game heralded as “the new esports bomb by the studio which invented esports”, which should surely equate to ground-breaking Twitch viewerships… then it’s almost disapointing.
Add to that:
- OW actually was fully available on Twitch for 12 months in 2017, while it was officially out for only 7 in 2016… so all things being equal, OW could be considered as going downhill year-on-year
- very successful esports titles all show a natural tendency towards Twitch viewership growth, especially in their early lives. The fact that OW has already stopped growing, maybe even started shrinking, across a full year and not even 2 years after it’s out, is at best not encouraging at all.
A question then comes to mind: how would this game have performed, especially in the esports world, if it hadn’t been pushed by Activision Blizzard’s huge marketing firepower, and credited blindly with the seal of “the studio that invented esports with Starcraft”?
My personal opinion on OW, and it’s more or less been the same since beta stage: the game does look amazing and the character design is godly, but it’s not exciting enough to play and watch as an esports discipline.
As someone who’s been looking at esports games very closely for the past 15 years, trying hard to study and understand how and why they develop, I consider OW has several core game design issues which Blizzard doesn’t even seem to see or consider as problems. As long as they don’t address those issues, I don’t think they should expect stellar viewership results, no matter what top notch producer or caster they hire, or how much $ they invest.
Whatever my opinion though, I hope the OWL is a big success and the billionaires who invested millions in it can enjoy a nice ROI. That would make the life of just about anyone involved in esports easier.
That’s it for games 6–10 of 2017!
See you soon for part 2 of this article, which will cover the Top 5 Twitch Games of 2017.
