Twitch Top 10 Games of 2018
2018 was another year of growth in the gaming live streams space, especially on Twitch where numbers were nothing short of impressive. One of the things that pushed Twitch tremendously has been the rise of non-gaming content. In this article though, we will leave that kind of content to the side and focus entirely on games, which have also been growing obviously.
So let’s have a look at the Top 10 Games on Twitch in 2018, ranked by Hours Watched. The first thing you’ll notice should be Fortnite… and the second one could be the stability: only one new game showed up in the yearly list. What’s more outside of Fortnite ranks almost were unchanged, showing once more success in live streaming — and esports for that matter — has a lot to do with long term sustainability.
1. Fortnite
1 350 M HW / +1 558% / +9 ranks
… well now we can: in 2018, Fortnite redefined Twitch standards by becoming the undisputed #1 game and setting a series of platform-wide records.
After almost a year of non stop growth, Fortnite hit its peak in July and since then seems to have found some kind of cruising speed at around 110M HW/Month. Streaming icon Ninja’s numbers going down sigificantly towards the end of the year didn’t hurt Fortnite one bit, showing the momentum is coming from the game itself, not influencers.
Fortnite started 2019 stronger than it ended 2018. And if Epic finds a suitable recipe for professional esports, the game should reach new peaks way beyond what we’ve seen so far. I also expect the newly-released creative mode could bring a lot of value over time and could even turn out to be a key towards unlocking the aforementioned esports potential.
2. League of Legends
983 M HW / -0% / -1 rank
Despite losing Twitch’ crown to Fortnite, and another year of significant drops of its professional esports viewerships, League of Legends has managed to keep its overall Twitch momentum almost intact in 2018. Nine years after release, this surely shows how unbelievably powerful the game is.
The major question for 2019: can Riot Games put League esports back on a growing track in the West? I’d say they will as announcements around the League European Championship and national championships in Europe, matched with behind the scenes moves, have been making me optimistic.
All in all, I feel in recent months Riot Games has taken a couple steps back towards their gamer-friendly DNA of the start up days, which brought so much success to them, and will put a lot of effort into supporting their esports community at all levels in 2019. And that’s making me optimistic because it’s the only winning strategy I’ve witnessed in esports across the past 20 years.
3. Dota 2
472 M HW / +8%/ = rank
In the race to the top of Twitch, Valve’s MOBA has always been the quiet one but don’t you call it dead! Dota 2 almost recorded its best year on Twitch in 2018. Riding the back of a very successful edition of “The International”, Dota 2 managed to keep its 3rd spot in the hard-fought Twitch top 10.
It seems to me the game, which some purists call “the better MOBA”, has become even more of a flagship title for Valve in 2018. The gameplay has kept improving this year to deliver ever more epic battles for gamers to fight through and viewers to watch. This and the successful production of the Majors circuit all around the world has allowed DotA 2 to stay up there.
Can Dota 2 keep its spot on the podium in 2019? It will be interesting to see if The International’s move outside of North America to China proves fruitful. Also, each year the competition for esports eyeballs gets fiercer and it doesn’t seem like Dota 2 has a ton of additional room left for growth while the trailing PUBG, and to a lesser extent Ovewatch, could definitely get a nice bump and still end up far from their own ceiling.
4. PUBG
453 M HW / -13% / -2 ranks
Ranking 4th on Twitch is extremely high, an outstanding achievement… but 2018 will remain mostly as a year of disapointments for PUBG as it kept dropping almost month after month throughout all of it. Looking from afar, it looks as though heavy recurring technical issues hurt the core gameplay experience for most of 2018.
Most of these issues have apparently been fixed now? This is yet TBC, but from my observations, top streamers have started picking the game up again and community feedback has been less fiery as of late. Another set of good news for PUBG could be coming from the esports front as 2018 has shown the game’s high potential in that regard a couple times.
2019 is full of big questions and opportunities for PUBG. Considering the game’s raw potential, which is enormous, if Bluehole manages to both entirely fix the gameplay experience, and get a successful professional esports league up the ground, 2019 could end up a stellar year for PUBG.
5. CSGO
401 M HW / +0% / -1 rank
CSGO has been hurting all year on a day-to-day basis even more than the previous ones because of all the attention gathered by almost directly competing Battle Royale titles.
What’s been saving Valve’s legendary FPS franchise has been its crazily efficient esports eco-system, which has been evolving like it’s been on steroids from the future: if it wasn’t for continuously more appealing and exciting high-profile tournaments, CSGO would have long been out of Twitch’ Top 10, and would most likely struggle to make it in the top 20.
In 2019, can CSGO pro esports keep growing from their grassroots base, now turned next gen global entertainment business, like it has in recent years?
And will the newly-released Battle Royale mode for the game help generate more activity at the casual level?! At the moment I’m rather hopeful for pro esports, not so much for the casual experience… That being said, CSGO and its player-base are strategic for Valve, even more so now that Fortnite’s publisher Epic has started competing on the games store front as well. I’d be surprised if Valve didn’t put a lot of effort into keeping CSGO very successful in 2019.
6. Hearthstone
356 M HW / -9% / -1 rank
Hearthstone dropped 2 ranks compared to last year but kept its prestigious spot in Twitch’ Top 10 as well as its title as “the most watched Blizzard game out there”. Add to that the release of competing cards-game Artifact by Valve in November hasn’t seemed to be too much of a problem so far.
But the December extension didn’t perform as well as past ones… and the core team behind the game actually left Blizzard last Summer to start their own indie studio (they’re working on a Marvel game…. Let’s keep a close eye on that one). The loss is not small for Hearthstone and considering how important extensions have been to the game’s life, it could prove seriously hurtful in the not-so-long run.
While esports haven’t been that prominent for Hearthstone up until now, in 2019 Blizzard will be running an updated version of its competitive circuit, starting with World Championships in Spring. I’m not sure how Hearthstone could turn out to be significantly more successful as an esports discipline by simply changing the tournament format or schedule, but as always I am curious to find out what new unforeseen circumstances could teach me a thing or two.
7. Overwatch
301 M HW / +31% / -1 rank
Each year since 2016, I finish it saying OW is a great game, but not great enough (yet?) considering the paramount esports ambitions and investments around it.
OW did grow 31% on Twitch in 2018 but the issue is it still couldn’t break the top 5 despite the broadcasting of the first season of the Overwatch League. Considering the budget invested to run the league, it’s not hard to evaluate the cost per viewer of the OWL was extremely high, the highest ever in the history of esports.
Another way of realizing the OW viewership problem comes by looking at the previous entry in this very list of top 10 games: how come Hearthstone, a 2D cards-game with barely any animation, has proven more appealing to watch than the top notch uber-exciting 3D shooter of the future that is supposed to be Overwatch?
Finding fruitful answers to that question will require a good deal of meditating in a warm and quiet place, far from the city’s lights and sounds and craze, by Blizzard’s best people.
My outlook for OW in 2019 is that as long as they don’t successfully improve the core gameplay experience, Blizzard’s esports teams will have to provide incredibly huge efforts to get OW to record unimpressive viewership numbers. OW still has tons of potential to be unlocked, the kind of potential that could really put it up there for good: hopefully the Californian giant finds the key to that golden door sooner than later.
8. World of Warcraft
260 M HW / +99% / = rank
In 2018, World of Warcraft had its best year ever in our data (our 1st full year being 2015), almost doubling on the previous record. The reason behind this surge was the release of the “Battle for Azeroth” Expansion in the Summer. Following the release, WoW skyrocketed to new heights almost overnight.
For sure 2019 won’t be a new record year for WoW, but will the positive trend continue? I’m not a WoW community member but I’ve been keeping an eye on community feedback and despite the big numbers of 2018, my sources aren’t that optimistic. It seems like WoW’s community could have been split in 2, the old school ones on the one hand and the new crowd on the other… The old school ones have been voicing their negativity heavily but it seems like the new crowd has been enjoying what WoW has become like never before, but for how long will the new crowd stick around?
While I don’t have the answer to that question, WoW’s momentum has been re-ignited and the community re-energized, at least in part, which means the 14-year-old patriarch still has at least a handful of years left for players to to craft epic stories with before the digital reaper comes to claim it.
9. Grand Theft Auto V
147 M HW / +25% / = rank
GTA V just recorded its best year ever on Twitch, and is the only primarily solo title in this Top 10 list.
Usually all solo AAA games fade very quick on Twitch, so how come GTA V has kept growing since its initial release 5 years ago? Well that’s because GTA V has become an extremely high quality multiplayer experience in Spring 2017… since the pirate release by amateur programmers of the FiveM mod.
Just like Counter-Strike was originally an upgrade of Half-Life built by amateurs, just like DotA (the original MOBA, from which League of Legends spawned) was originally an upgrade of Warcraft 3 built by amateurs… FiveM is also an upgrade of GTA V built by amateurs. And just like CS and DotA, FiveM has proven more popular in the long run than its original counterpart built by professionals. These are facts quite a few people have trouble getting their head around, and that’s understandable. But force is to say that amateur game makers have contributed heavily to this very Top 10 Games of 2018 list.
Thanks to FiveM, GTA V will keep thriving on Twitch in 2019… and will interestingly enough easily beat the newly-released Red Dead Redemption 2 on the platform.
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops IV
139 M HW / new entry
In the fall, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 splashed on Twitch like no other COD game before: it actually dwarfed past opuses as it took only one week of beta test in September to set a new monthly record for Activision’s flagship franchise.
What made Black Ops 4 so successful? When you consider how successful PUBG and Fortnite have been coming out of the blue, and when you also consider there was nothing really new in this COD version but the Battle Royale mode, it’s hard not to think of the latter as the #1 obvious factor.
In the start of 2019, COD BO4 will keep going on what is a very high pace for any COD game. But how will Activision handle the long-term competition with Fortnite and PUBG? Releasing a new box each year, which is a huge revenue requirement for COD’s business model and the entirety of Activision-Blizzard’s bottom line, is also a problem when it comes to building a successful game-as-a-service, and even more to engineer highly successful esports on top of it.
That’s it for my 2018 Top 10 Games recap!
See you in 2020 for perfect hindsight on 2019, a year which I hope you’ll all enjoy.
