Pretty much everyone is a smartphone user nowadays. Mobile gaming is huge in Southeast Asia and other regions of the world, with the most popular games & its tournaments gathering millions of Peak Viewers. Therefore, developers do not hesitate to make mobile games of their successful titles to iOS and Android. But how well mobile versions of games do on one of the most popular Western streaming platforms, Twitch? In the new article, we will compare the popularity of the PC and mobile versions of LoL, Apex Legends, and PUBG.
LoL vs LoL: Wild Rift
LoL: Wild Rift came out in 2020, more than ten years after the release of the original League of Legends game. During this period, third-party developers have released many LoL-inspired mobile titles, which have filled this segment of the market and gained their own fans. Due to the huge competition, Wild Rift could not become as popular as the original LoL and is currently largely inferior to LoL by Hours Watched on Twitch.
In July, Wild Rift generated over 2.9M Hours Watched, which is its best in a year at the time of publication. The original LoL peaked in January with nearly 184M Hours Watched, exceeding the mobile version's best score by 63 times.
Interestingly, almost 75% of Wild Rift viewers also attend LoL broadcasts. At the same time, the mobile version itself is not included in the top 10 categories of interest to the audience of the original League of Legends. It is curious that the audience of both versions actively watches streams in the categories of Just Chatting, Fall Guys, and Valorant, another game from Riot Games.
Apex Legends vs Apex Legends Mobile
Apex Legends Mobile entered early access for only a few regions in March and was fully released in May. The original Apex Legends game was out in 2019, and since then the number of the game’s fans has gradually grown. To date, the shooter is consistently in the top 10 most watched Twitch categories, and is also the most watched “battle royale”.
The last month of spring was the most successful for both the new mobile title and the PC version that was released in February 2019. Apex Legends has generated 81.25M Hours Watched, while Apex Legends Mobile generated only 630K Hours Watched, which is almost 129 times fewer.
The audience overlap between both versions of Apex Legends turned out to be much less significant than the one between LoL and Wild Rift. Streams dedicated to the original Apex Legends were watched by only 53% of the audience of the mobile version (6th spot). At the same time, the top 5 most popular categories among the viewers of Apex Legends Mobile included Just Chatting, Fall Guys, Minecraft, Valorant, and GTA V.
PUBG vs PUBG Mobile
PUBG Mobile is one of the oldest mobile games that are still popular today, given that it was released in 2018, one year after the original PUBG. April was the most successful month of the year for each of the versions of the game, with many gifts being given away in both games. The PC version of PUBG generated more than 15.9M Hours Watched, while the mobile version has reached the mark of just over 1.6M Hours Watched, which is almost 10 times fewer.
It should be noted that, compared to the original title, PUBG Mobile is much more popular in Southeast Asia and neighboring regions, where Facebook and YouTube have a much larger audience than Twitch.
PUBG Mobile viewers tend to watch the streams dedicated to Just Chatting, GTA V, Valorant, Fall Guys, CS:GO and four other categories before paying attention to PUBG. Only slightly more than 30% of the mobile version’s audience follows the broadcasts of the original title on Twitch.
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As you can see, it is the original PC versions of games that dominate Twitch, leaving the mobile versions far behind. This is mainly because the audience of the platform, for the most part, rarely resorts to mobile gaming given the much greater popularity of PCs and consoles as gaming platforms.