Nintendo recently held another of their Nintendo Direct events, where the video games company showcases upcoming titles, tease releases further down the line, and generates hype. The Nintendo Direct - 27.08.2024 & Indie World also officially integrated Indie World, a showcase for independent titles coming to the Nintendo Switch. Although many beloved gaming franchises were mentioned at the showcase, viewership for this Nintendo Direct continued a trend of low viewership for the series in 2024.
Viewership for the Nintendo Direct series in 2024 has been particularly volatile. In February, Nintendo held their least popular showcase event on record, reaching only 428,000 concurrent viewers at peak. However, the tables turned in June, when the Nintendo Direct - 18.06.2024 reached 2.96M concurrent viewers, becoming the second-most-popular iteration of the showcase series ever.
Viewership for these events largely depends on which gaming titles are mentioned. The event in June benefited from showcasing new titles for the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid series, all fan favourites from the Japanese games company. Although the recent August Nintendo Direct showed off Tetris, Civilization, The Sims, Yakuza, and many more franchises, these were simply not as popular among fans as other Nintendo titles.
In total, the short hour-long presentation from Nintendo generated 947.9K Hours Watched and received 1.19M Peak Viewers. Although these numbers would be highly impressive for any live-streamed showcase for a games company, Nintendo is a different beast. The games company has held 12 different Nintendo Direct events recorded by the Esports Charts database, and with 1.19M PV this event stands as the third-least-popular Nintendo Direct ever.
It does remain possible that the viewership for the event could have reached higher peaks if it had only lasted longer. As the event was quite short, viewership continued to climb and climb as it progressed, and it reached its peak viewership just before its culmination. Nevertheless, the June event which reached 2.96M PV was live for only 55 minutes, highlighting that the franchises involved with the presentation are the most influential factor for viewership.
Of course, with a showcase from such a world-famous games company happening, many of the streaming world’s favourite gamers tuned in and gave their own co-broadcast of the event. The event was broadcast by over 460 channels across Twitch and YouTube, but the official Nintendo channels still recorded a majority of the event’s total watch time.
Most of this official broadcast viewership came from the Japanese Nintendo channel, Nintendo 公式チャンネル, and secondarily, the English-language Nintendo of America. The Japanese account remains Nintendo’s most popular broadcast option for these presentations; the channel is routinely the most popular official broadcaster for the Japanese games company’s events, and this time it reached 429.9K HW. The Spanish Nintendo España channel was the next-most-popular official broadcast channel, but it fell far behind its Japanese and American peers.
In terms of community casters to cover the event, viewership was far lower for these accounts than the most popular Nintendo accounts. Maximilian_DOOD is a well-known fighting game community streamer, and for his coverage of the event he received 17.5K Hours Watched. He outperformed Spain’s alexelcapo who received 16K Hours Watched, and Japan’s VTuber Koyori ch. 博衣こより - holoX -. Interestingly, across both official broadcasts and community coverage, the same three language groups were represented.
While viewership for the recent Nintendo Direct was low, this is nothing to worry about for the game’s company. As this year has already proven, viewership for these showcases can be incredibly unstable and depends hugely on the franchises involved with Nintendo’s announcements. The recent Nintendo Direct was not close to the series’ peak viewership, but showcases in the future might be able to finally reach 3M concurrent viewers again.
