The coronavirus disease has had an irreversible impact on almost all spheres of our life and the gaming industry is no exception. With the start of the lockdown, esports had to rapidly adapt to the new format of tournaments, and streaming experienced an incredible increase due to the fact that people discovered live broadcasts as new entertainment.
In the second quarter of 2020, there was a strict lockdown in many countries, and we analyzed the audience of different languages on Twitch to understand how the pandemic affected streaming and whether the number of viewers increased. You can read the materials here:
Now we will compare the results of the second quarter of 2020 and 2021 and find out whether the growth of streamers and viewers on Twitch continued or with the weakening of the pandemic, the platform returned to the results before the pandemic.
April 2020 vs. April 2021
If we compare the total number of Hours Watched in April, the mark has increased by 24.1% since 2020. April 2021 was full of esports events: ONE Esports Singapore Major, ESL Pro League Season 13, BLAST Premier Spring 2021 and League of Legends and Call of Duty leagues. Such a large number of competitions directly affected the growth in interest in broadcasts.
Along with HW, the number of Twitch viewers increased by an average of 24.4%. Also, April got a lot of attention for the entire second quarter — 6.2M Peak Viewers and was the leader in the number of unique viewers for the month.
*To analyze the increase in Hours Watched by language, we looked at viewers of Italian, German, Spanish, French and Russian for 2020 and 2021.
Italian — 74.4%↑
German — 33.6%↑
Spanish — 100%↑
French — 21.1%↑
Russian — 18.1%↓
Note that in April, HW of broadcasts of all languages, except Russian, increased. At the same time, the number of unique channels of this language has doubled.
May 2020 vs. May 2021
As for streaming, May was a record for the Spanish content maker Ibai — he gathered 1.5M viewers on his channel due to the LAVELADA DEL AÑO event, where popular industry personalities met in the box ring. May also stood out because this month it was watched by the most viewers on average — 3.1M.
Hours Watched growth by language in May:
Italian — 48.1%↑
German — 47.9%↑
Spanish — 60.2%↑
French — 19.6%↑
Russian — 12.6%↓
June 2020 vs. June 2021
June Hours Watched improved by 18% and again not without esports: ALGS, Flashpoint Season 3, Blast Premier Spring Finals 2021, MSC 2021 and WePlay AniMajor. came to an end.
Also this month, there was E3 2021, where many game novelties and updates on previously announced titles were presented. LyonWGFLive stood out from the Italian streamers and its GTA V streams attracted the largest number of viewers for this language. Spanish performance has improved thanks to Ibai and his multi-game streaming marathon.
Hours Watched growth by language in June:
Italian — 35%↑
German — 6.8%↑
Spanish — 40.8%↑
French — 4.3%↑
Russian — 6.9%↓
If we compare the second quarter of 2020 and 2021 in general, we can see a very strong increase in HW by almost a factor of 1.5. This was mainly influenced by a huge number of major esports competitions, as well as the gradual return of LAN events. Also, the general interest of people in the streaming industry has grown significantly due to the pandemic.
The dynamics of HW by month is the same: from May to June, a drop begins and this can be explained by the fact that students have their exam period, and then the vacation. Because of this, the number of viewers is falling.
The dynamics of active channels is also getting worse from month to month. Quarantine restrictions began to loosen, and as a result, fewer people run steams on the platform. However, the result is still higher than last year. So the pandemic has had a positive impact on the streaming industry, and even with its weakening, viewers still remained on the platform.
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