A week has passed since the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl. In that time, hundreds of thousands of players around the world have jumped into the game, with even more tuning in on streaming platforms. According to Streams Charts, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has quickly become one of the most popular game releases of 2024 in terms of viewership on streaming platforms.
On launch day, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was the second most-watched game on Twitch, trailing only GTA V. By the end of its first week, the game had racked up 12.4 million hours of watch time and maintained a spot in the top ten rankings, still beating out popular titles like Fortnite, Dota 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
As for peak viewership, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 dropped from first place to third. Its peak of 416,000 concurrent viewers was outdone only by Counter-Strike and Path of Exile 2. Counter-Strike saw a surge in viewership thanks to the European qualifiers for the Perfect World Shanghai Major 2024, while PoE fans were hyped by new gameplay footage for the sequel, which is set to release in December.
The most-watched streamer in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 section on Twitch was bratishkinoff. In the week following the release, his streams generated over 631,000 HW. While most of the top streamers came from Eastern Europe, there were also plenty of international content creators spending time in the Zone. For example, American streamer Klean racked up 84 hours of playtime, with an average of over 2,500 viewers per stream. One of the most active S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 streamers was surprisingly Brazilian alanzoka, a huge fan of the Action/RPG genre.
Most popular streamers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
The most successful day for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 section on Twitch was November 21, the first full day after the game’s release. That day, the section generated 2.8 million HW, with over 17,200 unique streaming channels. After that, there was a gradual decline, and by the end of the first week, both of those numbers had roughly halved.
In terms of audience distribution by language, there was a noticeable shift compared to release day. On day one, English and Russian-language streams had similar watch time, but by the end of the week, English had clearly taken the lead, with 37.8% of the total watch time compared to 29.1% for Russian. The share of watch time for Ukrainian streams dropped from around 9.2% to 7.1% over the week, though it still remained in the top three.
An interesting finding was the audience retention rate, as the number of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 streams decreased at different rates across language segments. For instance, during the first 24 hours (November 20 and 21), there were over 11,700 unique English-language channels. By day seven, however, that number had dropped to 2,000, or just 17% of the original count.
Regional European language segments, including Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese, saw a similar decline of about 15-19% from the initial number of channels. On the other hand, the Ukrainian language segment dropped only to 28%.
Despite S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 being developed by a Ukrainian studio, the most surprising engagement was shown by Japanese streamers. While there weren’t as many of them compared to other language groups, the number of Japanese streaming channels only dropped to 29% of the initial total over the week.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has become one of the biggest game releases of 2024 in livestreaming. In its first week, the game's section on Twitch generated over 12.6 million HW, making it the fourth-highest among all new game releases in 2024 so far. Only Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 had higher numbers in their first seven days. However, with a few more big titles still set to release before the year ends (like Path of Exile 2 entering early access in December), the final rankings could still change.
