Mobile games are one of the fastest growing sections of the video game and live streaming sector. In esports, mobile gaming is becoming hugely popular in select regions from around the globe, from East Asia to Latin America. These regions usually prefer to broadcast and view content on YouTube Live and the red platform is experiencing good growth, but Twitch’s sector is evolving dissimilarity.
Most Watched Mobile Games on Twitch in 2023
| Ranking | Game | Hours Watched |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | Clash Royale | 20.64M |
| #2 | League of Legends: Wild Rift | 14.57M |
| #3 | Brawl Stars | 13.54M |
| #4 | Garena Free Fire | 12.62M |
| #5 | Mobile Legends: Bang Bang | 7.82M |
| #6 | PUBG Mobile | 7.80M |
| #7 | Call of Duty: Mobile | 7.08M |
| #8 | Pokémon Go | 6.41M |
| #9 | Summoners War: Sky Arena | 6.10M |
| #10 | Clash of Clans | 5.77M |
In total, mobile games on Twitch in 2023 generated 151.93M hours of watch time, which is not only markedly less than YouTube Live but also significantly fewer hours watched than the previous year. Compared to 2022, mobile games on Twitch generated 32.7% fewer Hours Watched, continuing a trend of dropping viewership. In 2021 the sector garnered over 312.2M Hours Watched, and in 2022 the sector saw 31.2% fewer HW compared to the previous year.
Mobile games on Twitch are losing viewership, and the decline in viewership has increased over the past couple of years. Nevertheless, this section of Twitch is still a vibrant corner of the live streaming community and does generate a significant amount of watch time.
For this article, we are taking a look at the most watched games, channels, and game publishers on Twitch, including insights into which regions are the most influential in this sector. Mobile gaming is the new wave of video gaming, with low barrier to entry and the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, the trend of mobile games isn’t going to slow down any time soon.
At the top of Twitch mobile gaming in 2023 was Clash Royale. The spin-off title from Clash of Clans generated 20.64M Hours Watched throughout 2023, far more than any other competitor on Twitch. Clash of Clans, which also ranked 10th here with 5.77M HW, was wildly popular upon release in the early 2010s, and developers Supercell capitalised on this popularity by releasing Clash Royale: a more action-packed version of the game with less downtime. The title was a huge success, and now overshadows the original game.
Just behind Clash Royale was League of Legends: Wild Rift, the official mobile game from Riot Games. The League of Legends spin-off generated 14.57M Hours Watched throughout 2023, although it managed this with the lowest Viewers per Channel figure of any other game in this top 10. Wild Rift is one of the more popular options for content creators to broadcast on this ranking, but this is coupled with lower viewership for each individual channel on average.
Finishing out the podium places is Brawl Stars, a 3v3 MOBA title released by Supercell. Brawl Stars released in 2018 and is the most popular release from the games studio since Clash Royale. Brawl Stars garnered 13.54M Hours Watched on the purple platform in 2023, and hosted some of the most popular esports tournaments in Western mobile gaming this year. Mobile gaming esports is hugely popular in Asia and this region dominates both competition and viewership. The same is true for live streaming viewership overall, but Supercell’s titles are making a path for themselves in the Western markets.
The next three titles in this ranking, Garena Free Fire, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and PUBG: Mobile are hugely popular in Southeast Asia and other regions such as Brazil, but the overwhelming majority of their viewership comes from platforms other than Twitch. All three still generated a large quantity of viewership, with Garena Free Fire leading the way with 12.62M Hours Watched, but this viewership is almost nothing compared to the watch time generated for these titles on YouTube Live and other platforms popular in Asia. Both Free Fire and ML:BB have experienced millions of fans concurrently tuning in to their esports events, but their Twitch viewership was not representative of their global popularity in 2023.
The three remaining titles for this ranking, Call of Duty Mobile, Pokémon Go, and Summoners War: Sky Arena, all generated substantial viewership in 2023, but none of them garnered more watch time than in 2022. In fact, nearly every mobile game in this top 10 ranking received lower viewership this year than in 2022, with the exclusion being Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which recorded 26% more HW in 2023 than last year.
German content creator Trymacs was the most watched mobile game streamer of 2023. He garnered 2.46M Hours Watched through his mobile game streams, although his channel generated much more watch time overall in the year. Trymacs is not a dedicated mobile game streamer, but his general popularity combined with over 233 hours of Airtime broadcasting mobile content was enough to rank him first here.
In second place is the official BrawlStars Twitch channel. The broadcast channel generated 2.38M Hours Watched this year, and the most watched content for the channel was its coverage of the World Finals esports event for Brawl Stars. Esports tournaments are wildly popular in live streaming and generate a significant amount of watch time, and the BrawlStars Twitch channel proved this by ranking so highly on this list.
Following on the train of esports, mortenroyale ranks third in our list. Morten is a German esports professional competing in Clash Royale with SK Gaming, and has built an audience for himself by broadcasting Clash Royale gameplay on his Twitch channel. In 2023, he earned 2.02M Hours Watched and was the most prolific broadcaster of this ranking, with a momentous 1.6K hours live in the year.
Many more esports professionals populated this ranking: BigSpinCR is another professional esports player for Clash Royale, JuicyJCR previously competed in Clash Royale and is now a commentator for the esports discipline, SpiukBS is a Spanish commentator for Brawl Stars, and Trebor is a retired Brawl Stars player turned content creator. The esports industry supplies participants with a unique opportunity to transition into live streaming and content creation, and the above top-ranking Twitch streamers for mobile games is the proof of this.
Unsurprisingly considering the most watched games on Twitch for this year, Supercell is the cream of the crop with over 40M Hours Watched garnered through their games in 2023. The Finnish mobile game development company is the most powerful force in Western mobile gaming at the moment, and it’s not even close.
Riot Games ranks second in this list with only one singular game. Compared to Supercell, which accumulated its viewership through a diverse handful of games, Riot Games achieved their watch time solely through Wild Rift. The games company recorded 14.57M Hours Watched in 2023, and ranked above other companies with multiple titles to their name in this sector.
Garena’s wildly popular Free Fire title is to thank for their ranking here. Free Fire is hugely popular on YouTube Live, garnering much more watch time there than on Twitch, but they still recorded a respectable amount of watch time on the purple platform. Finishing up the ranking are two Chinese games companies: Tencent Games and Moonton. Tencent owns a significant portion of the gaming industry, and even owns a majority stake in Supercell. For this collated data, we considered Supercell their own entity and included only games directly released by Tencent under their title here.
Spanish was the largest contributor to overall watch time of mobile games on Twitch, with 27.2% of all viewership coming from Spanish-language channels. This data of course encompasses both Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries such as in Latin America. Spain had some top creators in the sector for 2023, but Latin America contributed the majority of channels; Mexico was the clear leader of Latin American countries for mobile gaming on Twitch, with many of the top channels of the year hailing from the Land of the Aztecs.
English contributed 25.7% to the total watch time, which represents an eclectic array of channels from around the globe - not only channels from countries with English as an official language. Portuguese-language broadcasts contributed 14.8% to the total, and most of these channels hailed from Brazil. Brazil is a large budding market for mobile gaming, but the majority of the country prefers YouTube Live. Portuguese-language broadcasts were nevertheless a significant portion of Twitch’s mobile gaming sector, but the true potential of this language is unrealised on the purple platform.
Twitch is not the premiere live streaming platform for mobile gaming, and yet, the platform features a blossoming community of creators from around the globe who generate millions of Hours Watched. The size of the mobile gaming market on YouTube Live is a marker for the potential this industry has in live streaming, and this potential is one that Twitch is still realising. Mobile games will only grow in popularity in the upcoming years, so stick with Streams Charts for an objective, data-driven overview of the live streaming industry.
