If creating a ripple before the release of its Early Access build was not enough, Sons of the Forest has grown by leaps and bounds on Twitch over the past six days. The survival horror sequel to 2014’s The Forest saw its Early Access come out for PCs on February 23, 2023, and it has quickly climbed up the viewership charts on the purple platform.
The developers, Endnight Games, said they are hoping to be in Early Access for around 6-8 months, so there’s lots of time to see how the game performs once the initial hype dies down. However, the company added that the Early Access could end earlier if they are certain “this is the best version of the game possible,” so gamers could possibly be experiencing a lot of features that end up making the final iteration.
Sons of the Forest enjoys meteoric viewership rise on Twitch after Early Access release
This open-world offering got off to a strong start in terms of viewership numbers on Twitch, but given the sudden rise in interest in its predecessor so close to its Early Access release, this wasn’t a surprise. The fact that a lot of variety streamers have created awareness about the franchise via their gameplay streams and have discussed the sequel has only helped create a wave online.
Over the past six days, Sons of the Forest has been the fourth most watched game on Twitch as per Hours Watched, behind only the likes of perennial favorites like Valorant, League of Legends, and Grand Theft Auto V. The Just Chatting genre continues to lead the charts by a mile, although it cannot be considered a gaming segment for the purposes of this article.
Sons of the Forest notched 20.91 million HW and 775K Peak Viewers since its Early Access release. It shows how much the playthroughs of its predecessor by streamers on various platforms and the general word of mouth for its availability have hyped the game up.
In terms of Average Channels, Sons of the Forest was eighth on the table of most streamed games over the last six days, at 3K unique channels. FPS games dominated this list, with Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Valorant, and Apex Legends in the top four in that order.
In terms of its PV count, the game finished fifth in the standings, with Minecraft at the top. These two games being sandwiched by genres like Sports, Just Chatting, and Special Events made it quite an achievement for them to make it to the top five for this period.
Numerous big-name streamers buy into game’s hype
Sons of the Forest also became pretty popular among some famous content creators out there, as already mentioned. So invested were they in the game that the likes of GRONKH, Trymacs, IlloJuan, alanzonka, and xQc featured in the top ten for streaming it both in terms of HW and PV.
Channels that streamed Sons of the Forest the most based on HW and PV
GRONKH was the leading streamer for the title with 1.23 million HW, followed by Trymacs (757K) and IlloJuan (636K). Nexxuz World (515K) and xQc (420K) rounded out the top five of this particular standing.
KaiCenat was the top streamer for Sons of the Forest with 70K concurrent viewers, followed by IlloJuan (69K) and xQc (63K). Rubius (54K) and GRONKH (50K) were the other names in the top five of this list, and it is safe to say these internet personalities have helped get over the game’s Early Access build immensely over the past week.
European language speakers were more into Sons of the Forest
A language-wise breakdown of the streams for the game between February 23 and February 28 shows that English was the most popular language on Twitch. It accounted for 29.4% of the total 20,913,485 HW during this phase.
The second-most popular language was German at 19.8% of the total watch hours, followed by Spanish at 13.1%. The rest of the languages had single-digit contributions to this metric, as the top three languages accounted for almost two-thirds of the total HW, at 62.3%.
Most interestingly, Sons of the Forest has the most Unique Authorized Viewers among any game over the last six days. It put up a 7,345,016 UAV number, followed by Just Chatting (5,408,258) and Valorant (1,997,969), two topics fans watched the most alongside streams of the title in question.
73.6% of Sons of the Forest viewers also watched broadcasts of the former, while 27.2% of watchers caught up with Riot Games’ FPS offering on the purple platform. Other popular intersecting games included Lol, Minecraft, GTA V, and CS:GO.
By the looks of it, Endnight Games might just have a long-term winner on their hands, one that will surpass all expectations and make up for the failed momentum of its first part from almost a decade back.