On January 15, The Last of Us premiered on HBO, the long-awaited TV series adaptation of the cult game. The 80-minute pilot exceeded even the wildest expectations, reaching more than 10 million viewers in two days. This is the best start in HBO series history since House of the Dragon and Boardwalk Empire.
Such hype around The Last of Us couldn’t but affect Twitch’s audience. In the new article, Streams Charts will tell you how much the premiere of the series increased the game’s viewership statistics, and which streamers had the greatest impact on this.
The first surge of popularity of The Last of Us Part I on Twitch in a long time happened a couple of days before the premiere of the series. On January 13, the category collected 52.5K Hours Watched, more than half of which were generated by the viewers of Carreraaa: on that day, the popular Argentine creator just started playing the game’s playthrough on his stream.
On the day of the premiere of the series, The Last of Us Part I collected 45.3K Hours Watched. As the hype around the series increased, the statistics of the category began to grow rapidly, and already on January 18, the game collected almost 141K Hours Watched.
In total, from January 15 to January 18, The Last of Us Part I collected more than 336K Hours Watched on Twitch. Spanish streamer Rubius became the most popular in the category during this period, as his viewers generated 30.5% of the game’s total. The top 5 also included Carreraaa, AriGameplays from Mexico, Ultia from France, and ale_apoka from Brazil.
We analyzed all the streams on Twitch and found out that The Last of Us was the most actively discussed on January 16th. On that day, the name of the series appeared in the chat 36.7K times. In the days that followed, the show's mentions began to dwindle.
Also, on January 16, the chat mentions of HBO reached the peak mark of 11.7K. At the same time, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay, who played the main roles in the series, were most actively discussed a day later, on January 17th. On the same day, an increase in the game’s stream activity on YouTube Live was recorded.
It should be mentioned that, despite the growth of indicators, The Last of Us Part I is still far from Twitch chart’s top categories. While the game has collected more than 100K Hours Watched per day, the most popular titles collect ten times more. For example, on January 18, LoL, Minecraft, and GTA V collected 4.3M, 3.9M and 3.4M Hours Watched, respectively.
The Last of Us is expected to feature eight more episodes of different lengths, the last of which will be released on March 13th. At the same time, fans are already calling the series the first non-shameful adaptation of the game in a while.
