TennoCon is the yearly convention hosted in London, Ontario, by Digital Extremes for their title Warframe. Warframe, a free-to-play action RPG, saw its first TennoCon in 2016, and the event has been hosted annually since. 2023 marks the ten-year anniversary of the title, and Digital Extremes arrived at TennoCon 2023 with some major updates to the game, and yet, viewership marked a low point in TennoCon’s last five years of conventions.
At TennoCon 2023, the developers announced two new major content expansions, a brand new update, and a cross-save finally arriving on all platforms. The ability to cross-save is coming as Warframe gears up for its mobile launch next year, and despite these grand plans, the content for the free-to-play game isn’t slowing down. Warframe showcased Whispers in the Walls, a new cinematic storyline expansion for the title, and Warframe 1999, a much different nostalgic expansion based on the ’90s.
Who will find the Silvern Seas and awaken our Ancestors? You will, Envoy.
— Soulframe (@PlaySoulframe) August 26, 2023
Reserve your Envoy Title today at https://t.co/mRWsdxrpqe pic.twitter.com/rLYz05FAEz
Teaser video for Digital Extremes upcoming new game Soulframe
Not only focusing on one title, Digital Extremes also showcased a gameplay demo for their upcoming fantasy MMORPG Soulframe, which was announced last year.
TennoCon 2023 Viewership
TennoCon received 1.62M hours of watch time across its six-hour broadcast, as developers sat down in Ontario to discuss the game’s long history and announce upcoming updates and news for the title.
Viewership reached its peak towards the end of the convention, as Digital Extremes showcased a new gameplay demo for their upcoming Soulframe project and 364K peak concurrent viewers were reached during this demo. Despite the love and community support for Warframe, viewers were mostly interested in the upcoming fantasy title from the developers.
Although the main Twitch broadcast received the majority of the attention, other streamers did cover the event on their channels. The two biggest streamers in the live-streaming sphere to cover the event were Lirik and Cohhcarnage, who received 15.9K Peak Viewers and 11.4K PV respectively.
Although the two streamers covered the event, they only were live for the final two hours of the convention, and both of them were sponsored to stream the event on Twitch. Despite being the most popular community streamers for the event, their viewership for these streams was below average compared to their recent statistics.
Tacticalpotato was the largest community streamer for TennoCon who is a dedicated Warframe streamer. The Irish streamer enjoyed a boost in viewership from his Warframe-loyal fanbase, and his stream of the event received 3000%+ more Hours Watched than his average stream in July of this year. Although the 8.2K concurrent viewers he received is higher than his average in this metric, it was unable to match the 14.8K Peak Viewers he received during TennoCon 2021.
Two sponsored streamers may have been the most popular broadcasters of the event, but Warframe has its own live-streaming community on Twitch. Many community streamers covered TennoCon and were not able to compete with the official broadcast in terms of viewership, but many of these community members enjoyed a healthy boost to viewership from the event.
Most popular Warframe streamers of the year
Warframe’s official account was the most popular Warframe channel of the year by far. Although they host regular streams on this account, 1.3M hours of its watch time for the year came directly from TennoCon 2023 and is by far their most popular stream of the year.
Loyal Warframe streamer Brozime was the second-most-watched channel of the year. Brozime reached 350K hours of watch time throughout the year so far and his IRL stream at TennoCon was his third-most-watched stream of the year. Other streams in the most-watched rankings like Gaz_TTV and knightmar3frame saw their coverage of the event perform considerably well on Twitch. However, these smaller streamers weren’t able to reach viewership higher than what they earned for covering 2022 Warframe events.
In terms of the most popular Warframe channels per peak concurrent viewers, moistcr1tikal appeared here for his coverage of TennoCon 2023 on his channel as part of a sponsorship. Although he wasn’t as popular as Lirik, he still received decent viewership compared to his recent averages.
It’s hard to say exactly how impressive this viewership is for the convention without comparing it to the other events hosted in this series, so let’s take a look at the viewership of the last 5 years of TennoCon.
TennoCon viewership comparison (2019-2023)
Viewership comparison for TennoCons over the last five years
Comparing TennoCon’s recent event to its previous peers, the event was the second-least-watched convention in the event’s history since 2019. Looking both at the average concurrent viewers and the peak concurrent viewers, the event ranks in the second-lowest spot.
TennoCon 2019, the fourth event since its inauguration in 2016, received the lowest viewership of the past five years. It’s likely that the 2020 and 2021 iterations of the events benefited from the pandemic live-streaming boom, but these events were also supported by huge announcements from the developers.
At TennoCon 2021, Digital Extremes officially announced the cross-play and cross-save features for the game were entering development, a long-awaited feature for the title which has been available on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch for many years.
TennoCon 2023 was the first return to a live and in-person convention for the organisers since the pandemic, but this return is bittersweet considering the comparatively low viewership following the event. Perhaps the move to in-person events drew away from online viewership as fans returned to a live convention, but there’s no dismissing the 166K gap in Peak Viewers comparing 2023 to 2021.
Ultimately, TennoCon returned to its first live convention in Ontario since 2019, but viewership on live-streaming platforms was not there to support the event. Although over 100 community members live-streamed the broadcast for TennoCon 2023, viewership for these streamers was low as only a handful of them were able to receive significant viewership. With new expansions coming to Warframe and an all-new title coming with Soulframe, the future has a lot in store for Warframe, whose developers will be moving forward after the recent convention.
