One of the most challenging months of the past few years has come to an end, so it is time to sum it up. In a new Streams Charts article, we tell you about the most popular categories, streamers, and broadcasts of March on Twitch, and show you the most viewed clip of the month.
Most popular categories in March 2022
March had three more days than February, resulting in a significant increase in many of Twitch's viewership metrics. For example, Just Chatting showed a better result in Hours Watched over the month by 5% and remained the most popular category on the platform by a considerable lead.
Lost Ark dramatically lost its popularity and dropped from second to tenth place in the ranking, losing 70% of its Hours Watched. Due to this, League of Legends moved up one spot in the ranking, amassing 139.3 million Hours Watched in March. The game's metric increased by 8%, mostly thanks to esports tournaments, as the summer splits in regional leagues are now coming to an end.
A leap from eighth to third place goes to Elden Ring. We should remind you that in just a few days after its release in February, the game accumulated more than 59.4 million Hours Watched on Twitch, and in March the number increased by 123%.
GTA 5 and Valorant maintain their places in the ranking, improving their Hours Watched results by 8% and 31%, respectively. Active increase in metrics of the main rival of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive related to the VCT 2022 Challengers & European regional leagues that ended in March.
CS:GO drops from sixth to ninth place, losing 14% of its Hours Watched. Despite the game's major ESL Pro League Season 15 event, there were no big offline championships in March, which explains the decrease in viewership activity in this category.
Fortnite and Apex Legends follow CS:GO. The games improved their Hours Watched results by 25% and 10%, respectively. Epic Games' Battle Royale owes much of that growth to the start of the new season and streamer tournaments, including Fortnite Monday hosted by Ludwig. You can read more about the success of this event here.
The only new category in the ranking was World of Warcraft, featuring the third season of Shadowlands kicking off in early March. In a month, the game amassed 56.2 million Hours Watched, a 262% increase over February's result. This was due to the enormous popularity of the Race to World First event broadcasts, a speed-run competition between WoW guilds where they complete raids at the highest difficulty.
Most Popular Channels in March 2022
xQc became the most-watched streamer in March. Viewers spent 18.2 million hours watching his broadcasts, 10% fewer than in February. Notably, the streamer spent almost half as much time playing GTA Online, focusing on Valorant and LoL.
Gaules ranks second, with 14.7 million Hours Watched (+9.9%) accumulated in a month. In March, the most popular Portuguese-language male content creator actively streamed tournament matches of top European and Brazilian CS:GO teams.
ESL_CSGO became the leader among the organization's channels and third in the overall ranking. The studio broadcast its own CS:GO tournaments (mainly ESL Pro League Season 15) and amassed over 10.5 million Hours Watched in a month, 9.3% fewer than in February.
The most popular streamer in the gambling world, Trainwreckstv, improved his performance by 4%, accumulating 9.9 million Hours Watched in March. This was enough to get into the Top 3 content creators on Twitch for the first time and outpace Asmongold, whose results dropped twofold against the backdrop of Lost Ark's decline in popularity.
At the same time, another gambling streamer, ROSHTEIN, fell from seventh to tenth in the ranking, losing 7% of Hours Watched.
In March, Auronplay returned to the Top 10 streamers. His Hours Watched number increased by 24% thanks to the resumption of broadcasting GTA Online.
A newcomer to the ranking is a Japanese streamer fps_shaka, who improved his results by 27% in March due to the increased popularity of Valorant and LoL.
Along with ESL_CSGO, the top 10 Twitch channels in March included two other organization's channels: Echo_Esports, where Echo Guild streamed its participation in the World of Warcraft event mentioned above, and LCK_Korea, which covered regional LoL and LoL: WIld Rift tournaments matches.
Most Popular Female Streamers in March 2022
ironmouse became the most popular female streamer on Twitch for the second month in a row. In March, the VTuber accumulated 62% fewer Hours Watched.
Amouranth's Hours Watched number dropped by 6%, but February's gap from first place decreased significantly. Fuslie lost 14% of her Hours Watched in the month and lost one place in the ranking.
QTCinderella is in third place with 1.75 million Hours Watched. Her results grew by 460% thanks to the broadcasting "The Streamer Awards 2022", which was also organized by QTCinderella.
Another virtual streamer, Shylily, rounds out the top 5. Over the past few months she has achieved great results: in December her channel had 16K Hours Watched, and by March the number was more than 1.4 million HW. On her road to success Shylily held a 40-day subathon and reached 300K followers.
Most Popular Broadcasts in March 2022
The ranking was based on the most successful broadcast per channel.
The above-mentioned stream of The Streamer Awards 2022 on the QTCinderella’s channel became the most-watched broadcast in March on Twitch. It attracted over 381K Peak Viewers.
The second most popular stream is a special program on the Genshin Impact 2.5 update, which was broadcast on the game's official channel. It was watched by over 357K Peak Viewers.
In third place is the third Disaster Chefs cooking show streamed by Ibai. Streamer was the organizer of the show with the prize pool of 40K euros, and the Peak Viewers number at this broadcast exceeded 280K people.
The top 10 esports-related broadcasts in March includes the LCK Spring and LEC Spring playoffs, as well as the RLCS 2021-22 Winter Split Major Grand final.
Most Popular Clip in March 2022
The most popular clip of March was from the March 19 broadcast of Echo_Esports, in which the guild defeats the Lords of Dread boss in World of Warcraft. In a little over 10 days it accumulated 43K views and became the most popular clip of the month.
