Baldur’s Gate 3, the highly anticipated RPG from Larian Studios, was released on the 3rd of August to a more-than-warm reception on Twitch. The game generated 3.7M Hours Watched on its day of release and took over the live-streaming platform completely. A week later, the game continues to dominate and captivate viewers on Twitch, racking up millions of hours of watch time daily and ranking within the top 5 games by watch time on the platform.
Here we will take a look at the initial viewership for Baldur’s Gate 3 and also draw parallels to two of the major new releases from 2023: Hogwarts Legacy and Diablo IV. Both of these games dominated Twitch’s viewership on release, but Hogwarts Legacy has lost nearly all of its attention whilst Diablo IV continues to be one of the more popular games on Twitch. Is Baldur’s Gate 3 following in the statistical footsteps of Hogwarts Legacy or Diablo IV? Read on to find out.
Baldur's Gate 3 first-week viewership
Since its release, Baldur’s Gate 3 has amassed 20.4M hours of watch time in only one week of streaming. The game is currently the fourth-most-watched category on Twitch across the last week, beating out titles like CS:GO and only a couple of hundred thousand hours of watch time behind League of Legends and GTA V. Even Valorant, which is in the midst of the Valorant Champions 2023 event, is less than 700K Hours Watched ahead of the new fan-favourite RPG.
While esports titles like Valorant and CS:GO receive a viewership boost from international tournaments and events, Baldur’s Gate 3 was helped along by its Twitch Drops campaign. Viewers of a Baldur’s Gate 3 stream with Drops enabled have the chance to earn a Twitch-themed purple cosmetic set for a limited time. The developers of the game have already announced that the RPG will not feature microtransactions at any point, so this presents one of the rare opportunities for players to receive cosmetics from a source outside of the game.
In terms of peak concurrent viewers, Baldur’s Gate 3 reached a Peak Viewers count of 481.5K, making it the third-most popular game for the week since its release. This ranks the RPG ahead of other titles like League of Legends (276K PV) and GTA V (295.8K PV), which normally dominate the viewership of Twitch. In fact, the hype for Baldur’s Gate 3 was so strong it was able to compete with some of the largest esports events in the industry.
Ahead of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the Peak Viewers rankings are CS:GO (584.4K PV), and Valorant (557.8K PV). CS:GO and Valorant are in the midst of some of their biggest tournaments of the year, CS:GO’s IEM Cologne 2023 and Valorant’s Valorant Champions 2023, and these events have added a huge boost to the games’ peak concurrent viewers. In spite of this viewership boost, Baldur’s Gate 3 was hot on their heels, showcasing the power of a new release in the live-streaming community.
Since the game’s release, each day has seen thousands of streamers flock to Twitch to stream their personalised experience of the RPG. The initial hype wave proved the strongest, as 5.3K streamers broadcasted the game simultaneously on the release day. Since then, some streamers have fully dedicated themselves to the game, with many top streamers for the game already reaching 60 hours of Airtime.
Still on top since our release day coverage, CohhCarnage remains the most popular streamer for the RPG on Twitch. The American streamer has received 1.44M hours of watch time since release and reached 65.5K peak concurrent viewers during his release day stream. CohhCarnage managed to outperform larger and more popular streamers like sodapopppin and shroud, despite comparable Airtime for the three North Americans.
Fextralife, a gaming organisation, ranked third per Hours Watched with 820K hours of watch time and also hosted the second-most popular stream for the new game on the 6th of August, receiving 38.6K Peak Viewers. Quin69 from New Zealand was one of the most-watched streamers, accumulating 523.4K Hours Watched and ranked fifth per most-popular streams, receiving 24.7K Peak Viewers. Impressively, Quin69 is one of the smaller streamers on the list, with less than 800K Followers on Twitch he was just behind shroud, who has over 10.6M Followers.
Moving further down the most-watched streamers ranking, we can see various communities from around the world represented. Alanzoka from Brazil was the largest Portuguese-speaking streamer for the game, with 402K hours of watch time, and REVENANT from Spain was the most popular Spanish-speaking streamer: he was one of the most prolific streamers of the week, racking up 71 hours of Airtime in only seven days.
Pungwollyang (풍월량) of Korea was the largest and only Asian streamer to rank on this list, receiving 379.8K hours of watch time. The Korean is one of the most-followed streamers on Twitch from his region and was able to totally monopolise the viewership for the region, receiving 185% more watch time than the next-most popular Korean streamer for Baldur’s Gate 3.
Comparison to other major releases
We’ve established that Baldur’s Gate 3 has become one of the most-watched games on Twitch, but this viewership from the initial hype wave never lasts. The question is, will Baldur’s Gate 3 follow Hogwarts Legacy’s immediate decline or Diablo IV’s persistent viewership?
Within the first week of release, both Hogwarts Legacy and Diablo IV lost at least half of their viewership. Hogwarts Legacy fell from 528K Average Viewers on its Twitch debut to 146K Average Viewers only a week later, marking a decrease of 72%. Diablo IV performed slightly better: falling from 541K Average Viewers on release day to 253K a week later, a drop of 53%.
Compare these two figures to Baldur’s Gate 3’s performance. The game received 156K Average Viewers on August 3rd and a week later this figure had fallen to 76K: a drop of 51%, the lowest yet. The future isn’t able to be prophesied from viewership statistics, but historical data for two of the biggest releases of the year shows a drop in viewership within the first week may be indicative of long-term performance for the title, as Diablo IV has performed much better in the long-term than Hogwarts Legacy.
It is worth mentioning that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a much longer game than either Diablo IV or Hogwarts Legacy. The main storyline of Hogwarts Legacy takes roughly 25 hours to complete, this rises to 35 hours for Diablo IV, and a monstrous 75 hours for Baldur’s Gate 3, according to the game’s Creative Director Swen Vicke. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Diablo IV also have a multiplayer co-op function built into the game, something that Hogwarts Legacy lacked. Both of these factors, co-op and game length, are something that does affect the long-term viewership of a title.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has completely taken over Twitch and fans of the RPG series are ecstatic to play the game themselves but also to watch their favourite streamer’s playthrough. The game took a podium spot as one of the most-watched games on Twitch this week, and the way its viewership has evolved throughout these last seven days implies that the title might receive considerably impressive viewership in the long run. Keep up to date with all the newest happenings and evolutions in live-streaming with Streams Charts.
