Only Up! is a new game published and developed by SCKR, an indie studio out of Korea whose first game has been a whopping success. The game is a Foddian-style game, following the success of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Foddian-style games are characterized by surmounting a challenging climb to the top of the level and, critically, their lack of checkpoints.
Only Up! has you play as a young teenage boy named Jackie who must, in a shaky capitalist metaphor, climb out of the ghetto and poverty, avoiding falling all the way to the bottom along his journey. The game was released on the 24th of May 2023 and rapidly built up hype to become one of the most-watched and streamed games of the month. Between releasing in May and gathering hype in June, Only Up! has had an over 4500% increase in Average Viewers.
Only Up! came out ahead of the likes of Fortnite, Minecraft, and Dota 2 in Hours Watched this month. In the popularity contest of most-watched games Only Up! remains the sole indie game in the top 15 for the last seven days. Similar to the rise of another small indie game Among Us, Only Up! owes its popularity and success to catching the eye of several big streamers who decided to stream the game.
Streamer KaiCenet first streamed the game on the 9th of June and although his time playing the game didn’t even last 30 minutes, he amassed 51K Average Viewers with a Peak Viewers figure of 55.8K. Since then streamers such as xQc, a top 5 streamer on Twitch per followers, Mizkif, and moistcr1tikal have all had hugely successful streams of Only Up!.
Looking at the viewership dynamics for Only Up! on Twitch we can clearly see KaiCenet’s June 9th stream. On top of this, there is also a spike on the 5th of June, mainly driven by aminematue, a French content creator with 2.18M Followers, and Kamet0, another French streamer. aminematue reached a Peak Viewers figure of 48.5K and Kamet0 34.7K. These two account for most of the Peak Viewer spike on this day.
After these two spikes the game continued to consistently but rapidly gain hype, culminating in the explosive peak we can see on the 19th of June. The stars aligned on this day as multiple top-level streamers all streamed the game. Streamers such as Jerma985, xQc, KaiCenet, and Ukrainian streamer Evelone192 all contributed to this.
Alongside these household names, madisonbeer also made the top ten most-watched streamers for the last seven days. Madison is an American singer who made her streaming career debut just earlier this month. She’s had an explosive start to her adventure into streaming, amassing over 350K Twitch followers and a Peak Viewers number of 55.9K. Only Up! has been a key factor in this success, although she’s only streamed the game for six hours she achieved 235K Hours Watched.
Popular streamers hopping on the Only Up! train have clearly been a key part of its explosion: with games like League of Legends or Valorant regularly having thousands of channels streaming, per Peak Channels, Only Up! has yet to hit the thousand channel mark.
Most Watched Only Up! Channels on Twitch
KaiCenet reached over 1,000,000 Hours Watched throughout this month streaming the game, through only 18 hours of Airtime. Comparatively smaller streamers like Distortion2 have also found great success through Only Up!, streaming the game for over 100 hours so far this month. Distortion2’s channel stats show this to have been a good decision, achieving a 60% increase in Average Viewers and an over 500% increase in Followers Gained this month compared to his averages.
Only Up! is not only limited to an Anglo-American sphere, French streamer Kamet0, Spanish streamer Rubius, and Russian streamer buster have all had successful months with the game. Compared to games like Grand Theft Auto V, where over 50% of all streams are in English, Only Up! captivates a huge international audience. English remains a majority but is followed closely behind by Russian, French, and Spanish.
Most Watched International Channels
Most Watched Channels streaming Only Up! in the last 7 days, English channels excluded
When excluding English streamers for the past 7 days, we can see the game is reaching Japanese and Korean streamers as well. Squeezie, a French streamer, had the largest amount of Peak Viewers with 52.4K people tuning in to watch the game. The beauty of Foddian-style games like Jump King, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, or Only Up! is that gamer rage knows no language barrier. You don’t need to speak Japanese to find watching a Japanese streamer rage at falling all the way to the bottom funny or entertaining.
Even Ukrainian streamer and Counter-Strike professional s1mple had to try Only Up!. His stream of the game achieved a Peak Viewers of 35.6K with an Average Viewers figure of 27.6K. This makes his Only Up! Stream his most successful stream of the last 7 days and one of the only games he has ever streamed excluding Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Valorant.
Even though Only Up!’s peak viewership is already a week behind us, the game continues to draw viewers, create hugely successful streams, and entertain hundreds of thousands of spectators. With over 40K Unique Channels having streamed the game, this number will only continue to rocket upwards.
