The latest title that won the internet and seemingly managed to unite the gaming community is no other than Elden Ring. Praised across the vast majority of gaming media outlets, the most recent game by FromSoftware took over the hearts and minds of gamers all around the globe for at least a few days.
The highly-anticipated RPG from the creators of genre-defining Souls series, such as Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls, was made in collaboration with a fantasy novelist and the author of A Game of Thrones novel George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting.
The game takes the famous, highly-challenging Souls formula and combines it with an open world and an enhanced narrative to put the player through a rollercoaster of emotions, similarly to other titles in the genre-defining series.
The result seems to be nothing short of phenomenal, as the game quickly placed among the highest-reviewed titles of all time and reached impressive sales numbers. Having received critical acclaim, Elden Ring had a massively successful launch not only in terms of sales and reviews but also in terms of viewership.
Outstanding viewership in the first week after release
Throughout the week following Elden Ring’s release, the game dominated Twitch by all metrics except for concurrent viewership. By Peak Viewers indicator, Elden Ring lost only to IEM Katowice 2022 held in CS:GO.
Disclaimer: Only data collected from February 25th to March 3rd have been included in the statistics.
With 74.96M Hours Watched, Elden Ring has become the most popular category on Twitch, surpassing Just Chatting by 16.9%. As for concurrent viewership, the category peaked at 910K Peak Viewers.
Out of the content creators who streamed the game after its release, xQcOW’s broadcast was, unsurprisingly, the most successful. During 27 hours of streaming Elden Ring, the long-term Twitch leader accumulated 1.97M Hours Watched, accounting for 2.6% of the category’s total HW count. His stream reached a maximum of 102K concurrent viewers — the highest peak among the channels that streamed the game.
After finishing the game, the Canadian streamer gave his final verdict on Elden Ring, claiming it is “definitely worth the money” compared to other titles and that it will win the Game of the Year award.
Other channels that saw remarkable viewership results thanks to streaming Elden Ring included stylishnoob4, Summit1g, HasanAbi, Asmongold, Rubius and Fextralife.
Despite having a cosmic jumpstart, the Elden Ring’s viewership success likely won’t last for too long. The game was hyped especially during the first couple of days after its release but started losing later to well-established titles such as GTA V, Apex Legends or League of Legends. That said, it remains fairly popular on the platform even after its first week, which is somewhat unusual for single-player titles on Twitch.
