Star Wars: Bounty Hunter was a retro action shooter title based on the Star Wars universe, following the Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett’s missions and providing backstory for the fan-favourite character. For the time, it was an immensely impressive title, both visually and for its gameplay. In June of this year, Lucasfilm Games announced an official remaster of the game, coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Windows, and Xbox.
The remaster brings updated and modernised visual graphics to the title, as well as some small pieces of extra content. The original 2002 game had become a powerful source of nostalgia for Star Wars fans, and Lucasfilm Games intended to capitalise on this nostalgia, not only ensnaring old fans to replay the game, but also bring new eyes to the title through the hype of its release. Unfortunately, the reception for the remastered version on Twitch has been lukewarm, at best.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Remaster Release Viewership
In the first week since the game’s release, the remaster of the retro classic has only received 28.5K Hours Watched on Twitch.
For comparison, Valorant receives more watch time than this every 15 minutes, according to averaged Twitch statistics for the past week.
The remastered title also only managed to reach 2.1K Peak Viewers, which was almost entirely due to one North American streamer who gave the game a chance. In total, the game was covered by 35 Unique Twitch Channels during its opening week, which accounts for channels that received more than 25 Average Viewers during their broadcast of the remaster.
Criken, an American Twitch streamer with 349K Followers on Twitch, gave the game a shot on August 7, streaming for just under 6 hours. Criken’s title for the broadcast, “I haven’t played this since I was 10”, clearly alludes to nostalgia for the remaster, although the game's developers were likely hoping for a much stronger nostalgia response from a wider audience. Criken received 2.05K Peak Viewers for this broadcast, making up the vast majority of the peak viewership achieved by the game.
The one redeeming factor for the game’s viewership on Twitch has been its Viewers per Channel metric. The game has not been broadcasted by many streamers, but those who have made the choice to take a chance on the remaster have enjoyed some of the highest viewership on average of any category on Twitch. Naturally, this figure is in fact boosted by streamers with a larger audience playing the game, and influenced by there being few streamers on the lower-end of the scale to balance this out.
Viewership for the remaster has generally been low, that is established. But to contextualise the viewership results for Lucasfilm Games most recent title, let’s compare the viewership for its release week to the release week viewership for Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, one of the most popular Star Wars games in livestreaming.
Comparing the viewership received by the two titles, the difference is night and day. While the bounty hunter title was not even able to reach 30K Hours Watched, Jedi Survivor accumulated well over 9.1M Hours Watched during its first week alone.
The peak viewership achieved by Jedi Survivor on its opening day was massive. In fact, the peak viewership achieved by Bounty Hunter, which was essentially the viewership for a Criken stream, was 99.1% lower than the Jedi Survivor viewership. Average Viewers tells a similar story of drastically fallen viewership, but the Viewers per Channel metric is once again the saving grace of the bounty hunter title.
Due to few broadcasters covering the game's release, the viewership from content creators such as Criken, MauLer, and GassyMexican managed to bring this Viewers per Channel metric up. On the other hand, the raw popularity of the Jedi Survivor release had a negative effect on this metric, as more and more streamers with few or no viewers were excited to try the game out.
All in all, the release of the new Star Wars: Bounty Hunter Remastered edition was no success. The title has struggled to gain viewership on Twitch, and the viewership it has received has largely been due to larger Twitch content creators falling victim to nostalgia and giving the game a short chance on stream. Keep trac of the viewership for the new Bounty Hunter release on its Games page.
