Fallout 4 Beats StarCraft II and Tomb Raider Launch
Streaming for Fallout 4 actually started the day before it came out, on the 9th, and it achieved an impressive 165 thousand peak concurrent viewers. By contrast, before launch day StarCraft II pulled 52 thousand peak concurrent viewers, and Tomb Raider pulled only about five thousand (the StarCraft II numbers include the older version of the game). Nonetheless, Fallout 4 began its lifetime on Twitch soundly beating an established rival with a new release right around the corner, no small task when that rival is a Blizzard game. Another interesting observation that came up when analyzing the data: no partnered channels began streaming Fallout 4 before 2 AM PST on the 9th, probably because no partners wanted to risk their channel just to stream a game slightly before embargoes were lifted.
On the 10th, launch day, things were pretty impressive straight through the early morning with Fallout 4 having 134 thousand concurrent viewers at 6 AM PST. All three launches peaked at 7 AM, when Starcraft II managed 48 thousand concurrent viewers and Tomb Raider had 21 thousand. However, Fallout 4 was the clear winner with 280 thousand concurrent viewers. Fallout 4 had an incredibly successful launch, helped in no small part by an announcement of new details at Quakecon 2015 and streams of the other Fallout games on Twitch over the preceding weeks. These streams managed to pull some fairly impressive numbers, no doubt contributing to the hype wave that Fallout 4 rode to it’s record breaking launch.
Fallout 4 has demonstrated clearly, once again, something people have suspected for some time now. It isn’t enough to simply make a great game anymore. A game also needs to have streamability. It needs to be both fun to watch people play and fun to play with people watching you (and be available on the platforms most broadcasters use), or you simply aren’t going to have the launch on Twitch you could have otherwise. Streaming tools and audiences are heavily geared right now toward PC releases. It is simply much easier to stream from a PC than it is from a console, and limiting yourself to a console release can now have direct effects on not only your game’s stream viewership, but all aspects of your launch. Also, it demonstrates how now more than ever what your game is going up against on launch is just as important as any other factor. Unfortunately for the new Tomb Raider and StarCraft II games, they walked right into an unwinnable situation.
