The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo 2021 took place from June 12 to 15. Due to the pandemic, presentations of new game projects took place online. In our article, we will determine the overall success of E3 and the most popular presentations.
Overall, E3 2021 amassed 19M Hours Watched, and the presentation of Nintendo Direct E3 2021 became the most popular one with 3.8M Peak Viewers. Nintendo's YouTube channel attracted the most viewers: a total of 1M people.
The hype regarding E3 2021 has grown because the pandemic has deprived us of all offline events in the gaming industry. We compared the presentations of E3 2021 with those that took place in 2019 in terms of Hours Watched and Peak Viewers.
The presentation of Nintendo Direct has shown the biggest growth, with conferences Hours Watched growing by 191% compared to 2019. The presentation of Ubisoft Forward has shown the best growth in terms of Peak Viewers. In 2019, the stream was watched only by 699K people, while in 2021 the number increased to 3M, which is 333% more.
Most Popular E3 2021 Channels
The official Twitch channel E3 amassed 2.1M Hours Watched – which is the best indicator among all the channels that showed the event. The presentation was broadcast by such gaming news channels as IGN and GameSpot. The exhibition was also attended by community casters, with Alexelcapo taking the third spot with 794K Hours Watched, while Mistermv collected 508K.
Nintendo's YouTube channels are in the lead in terms of Peak Viewers. The publisher's English and Japanese channels attracted 1M viewers and 679K viewers, respectively. The third spot was taken by the Twitch channel of E3 with 275K viewers, and closing the top were the YouTube channels of IGN and TheGameAwards.
How long did viewers stay on broadcasts?
We looked at audience overlap on E3 broadcasts to see whether there were any changes to E3's audience between the presentations. To measure this, we looked at the official broadcasts of the presentations.
Devolver Digital and Gearbox Entertainment have the highest percentage of overlap. 79% of the audience of this presentation watched Ubisoft Forward, something that was achieved because of the schedule, given that these two presentations were going one after the other. Next is Square Enix, with 55% of their viewers later switched to the Xbox and Bethesda presentation.
Let’s also check the overall level of viewer immersion of the broadcasts. The overall dynamics show that most viewers watched broadcasts for a maximum of 10 minutes and then went to other Twitch channels. At the same time, a fairly large percentage of people stayed until the very end of the presentation.
For example, 17% of Square Enix viewers were on official channels for more than 80 minutes in a row, while the presentation of Bandai Namco was watched for more than 70 minutes by 15% of the audience. Such indicators show that presentations tend to excel at holding the attention of people, given that a very small percentage of the audience tends to watch regular streams until their very end.
The year-long absence has greatly improved the indicators of E3 in 2021. Overall, the audience missed the large-scale exhibitions, with E3 being an event of precisely such scale. The event featured many popular publishers and major announcements, which is all the more reason for the high viewership result achieved. At the same time, Sony did not participate in the exhibition, as it will be holding a separate Sony PlayStation Summer presentation. According to insiders, the event will take place on July 8th and will show us the God of War 2 gameplay trailer, the announcement of Ghost of Ikishima, and other exclusives.
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