Ending last week was the largest speedrun event in Asia: RTA in Japan Summer 2022. Participants in the event were speedrunning a variety of titles, including Minecraft, titles from The Legend of Zelda series, Elden Ring, and many games from the Mario series. For the first time in a while, RTA took place offline, but let's talk about how many viewers followed the competition on Twitch.
RTA (which stands for Real Time Attack, this is how speedruns are commonly called in Japan) is a direct successor of another popular speedrun event: Games Done Quick. As with GDQ, The organizers of RTA also raise money for charity.
This year, the event was sponsored by Invincible Time, which prepared special merch for the event, part of the proceeds from the sale of which will go to the event participants, and the largest amount will be donated to the Doctors Without Borders charity organization. The organizers of RTA have not yet announced the final amount but promised to do so soon.
The RTA summer event was held on August 11-15, and the viewers brought the event over 5.1M Hours Watched during this time. A total of 50K Average Viewers were attracted by the broadcasts which took place on the organization’s official Twitch channel.
The event’s Peak Viewers mark was reached during the speedrun of the adventure game Dragon Quest III: with more than 91K viewers having gathered to spectate it. Super Mario Odyssey also ended up attracting much interest from the audience, and its speedrun attracted 86K Peak Viewers. More than 70K Peak Viewers also followed Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, Paris Chase, Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea, and The Ultimate Challenge from Beat Takeshi.
Talking about the total number of viewers of the event, the figures shown by RTA in Japan were quite impressive, as over 526K Unique Viewers have visited the broadcasts.
The official RTA Twitch channel gained more than 30K followers over the five days of the event. At the same time, more than 10K paid subscriptions were also issued: the proceeds from them will also go to charity.
Most watched & most popular RTA events
The viewership figures shown by RTA in Japan Summer 2022 were rather impressive, but the series also featured even more popular events. The winter event of 2021 remains the leader by Total Hours Watched, having generated over 6.6M Hours Watched (note that it was on the air longer than other competitions in the series). RTA in Japan Summer 2021 is the leader by Peak Viewers: at that time, more than 182K viewers gathered to spectate the Ring Fit Adventure.
Among the upcoming speedrun events, it is worth mentioning Flate Fatales 2022, which will be held under the auspices of Games Done Quick. The event will take place on August 21-27, and the funds raised during it will go to the foundation of human rights activist Malala Yousafzai.