December 2021 was a month when trends on the platform changed radically. Escape from Tarkov entered the top categories of the month on Twitch (it rose by 35 positions). Also, Spanish content creators became more interested in Rust. At the same time, Call of Duty: Warzone’s statistics suddenly went down. In a new Streams Charts article we examined what influenced the rise and drop of games on Twitch.
Escape from Tarkov — growth due to the Holiday events
Escape from Tarkov on Twitch grew due to the New Year event. Moreover, the game's publishers launched a gift-giving event — people could get gifts for watching the broadcasts of the game. In addition, the interest in the game increased due to the 25% game’s discount on the trading platform, which attracted even more players.
The game reached its Peak Viewers number on December 29th — it attracted 475K concurrent viewers. This was largely affected by the content creator Pestily. In the last week of December, he not only streamed Escape from Tarkov with enabled Drops, but also gave away 15 thousand dollars.
The day before the update (December 11, 2021), the game was watched by 18,7K Average Viewers. That number rose to 121K the next day when the update came out. At the moment, the game continues to stay high on the platform, so it is quite possible that it will remain in the top of the January categories. Moreover, with the New Year events, a new rating season has begun.
Rust — the influence of the Spanish community
Rust is a survival game that occasionally returns to the top of the platform thanks to famous content creators and servers where famous faces play. This time, the Spanish RP server Egoland drew the attention of viewers. Its creator Alexby11 launched the second season and invited many popular streamers from the region, such as ibai, TheGrefg, IamCristinini, Rubius and others.
Server members streamed the game and thereby returned the popularity of it on Twitch. The publishers also enabled Twitch Drops, which had an even bigger impact on Rust's statistics. If you compare it with the December 2021 Rust total of 6 million Hours Watched in a full month, that number rose to 34 million HW between January 1 and January 12! The Peak Viewers number in the last month was 910K spectators (as at January 7). However, the game lacked 500K Peak Viewers to reach the record number.
Call of Duty: Warzone — popularity begins to decline
For a long time Call of Duty: Warzone was one of the top 10 categories on Twitch. But after Nickmercs, a top-1 Call of Duty: Warzone streamer, has stopped streaming the game regularly since August 2021, the situation started to change for the worse. The content creator switched to Apex Legends and the Call of Duty: Warzone’s statistics declined — Nickmercs not only streamed the game, but also participated in Warzone competitions between the streamers. Although Nickmercs returns to Warzone from time to time, the game no longer reaches the numbers on the platform that it previously had.
Another factor behind the poor performance has become the not-so-good updates of the game. The new map 'Caldera' got a lot of negative feedback from streamers and ordinary players. Many have said that it's simply boring and has to be changed. From January to June 2021, Warzone was watched by at least 100K Average Viewers. However, in December the number was 70.6K Average Viewers (in November it was 49K, so the December increase was due to the update). In short, the game is gradually losing its audience.
What will be popular on Twitch in 2022? Streams Charts team will share more thoughts and predictions on our blog soon, but for now you can check out the streaming and results for 2021:
- Overall Twitch statistics in 2021
- Most popular categories on Twitch in 2021
- Top female Twitch streamers of 2021
- Most watched streamers of 2021
- The most watched esports channels in 2021
- The most popular sports games on Twitch in 2021
- The most popular New Year broadcasts on Twitch in 2021
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