Nintendo held its first Nintendo Direct online presentation in 2022 this week. The company revealed the upcoming releases and game updates. The 40-minute showcase was streamed on Twitch and YouTube and drew a huge number of viewers. Streams Charts tells you about the announcement and viewership statistics of the event.
There were several sequels announced at the February Nintendo Direct. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 will be released in September, five years after the second installment release: players will adventure in a war-torn world of giant fighting machines. Nintendo Switch Sports will also be released on April 29 (the beta test of the game begins at the end of February) and Splatoon 3 will be released this summer.
A new Mario game for Switch, Mario Strikers: Battle League, which is a futuristic version of the classic 5-on-5 football game, will be released in June. It should be noted that No Man's Sky and two installments of the Portal series will be ported to Switch. You can find all the other event announcements on Nintendo's YouTube channel.
Nintendo Direct viewership statistics
All Nintendo events (both online and offline) regularly draw millions of viewers. And the February 2022 presentation was no exception.
The company's YouTube channels in English and Japanese became the main platform for Nintendo Direct broadcasts, and the English-language channel became the leader in Peak Viewers, drawing over 920K spectators (2.2 times more than the Japanese channel). The company's English-language channel on Twitch rounds out the top three channels attracting 95.7K Peak Viewers.
Despite the fact that the Twitch channel did not gather many viewers, this doesn't mean that Twitch content creators didn't cover the event: on the contrary, many popular content creators, including LIRIK, rubius, Mizkif, sodapoppin and others, provided coverage of it. Thanks to the streamers, the event reached a total of 2.47 million Peak Viewers, and its Average Viewers number was more than 1.95 million spectators!
The previous Nintendo Direct event took place last September before the February showcase, and the new one was more successful in terms of viewers. Peak Viewers increased by 16%, and Average Viewers increased by 47%.
Nintendo isn't going to reveal all the details at the very beginning of the year. Many fans of the company's games have been waiting for news about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metroid Prime 4, but there has been no information about them. This means that at the next presentations we can expect the same kind of audience excitement.
