Minecraft has been consistently in the top 6 most popular Twitch categories over the past few months. One might think that it’s logical as the game is a real cultural phenomenon that has been setting numerous records. Still, the main audience of the game is on YouTube, but who is promoting the game as a streaming category?
Minecraft has significantly solidified its position on the Twitch chart over the past six months. In September-October, the game was not so popular and barely stayed in the top 10, but since November it has left the top five only once.
Moreover, the category have grown significantly by hours that viewers spend on streams. For example, Minecraft gained more than 82 million hours watched in February, which is 210% more than it was in September.
What makes Minecraft interesting to viewers?
Many online games are successful in streaming thanks to role-playing servers. For example, that’s how Rust became especially popular at the end of 2020: popular content creators rushed to OfflineTV RP-server and eventually made the game second most watched category on Twitch.
A similar situation happened in GTA 5, where the most popular English-language server NoPixel received a major update that significantly diversified the gameplay. As a result, the game also began to grow by viewership statistics.
Minecraft has a multiplayer survival mode (SMP), and that is what makes the game especially interesting to viewers. Many survival servers also adhere to the rules of role-playing, and the most popular of them is DreamSMP from the content creator under the name Dream who has 19 million subscribers on YouTube.
Over the past six months, streamers who are part of the DreamSMP Twitch team have contributed almost 1/4 of the game’s total hours watched. The community includes more than 20 streamers, but the most popular of them is TommyInnit, who became a local Twitch star in just two years.
TommyInnit accounted for over 5.8% of the category's total HW over the past six months. This is the largest percentage of any content maker who has streamed Minecraft lately.
There are other popular content creators in the DreamSMP community that came from YouTube: many of them have millions of YT subscribers, even though they are not even 18 years old. Englishman Tubbo and the American streamer Ranboo stand out, they accounted for 4.41% and 3.43% of the total hours watched of Minecraft for last six months.
At the same time, the audience of the DreamSMP streamers overlaps a lot. For example, about a third of TommyInnit viewers come to the broadcasts of other popular DreamSMP streamers: especially Tubbo, which is watched by more than half of TommyInnit viewers.
Who else is streaming Minecraft?
The top 10 most popular streamers in the category for six months includes five members of the DreamSMP team. The undisputed first place is held by TommyInnit. Even though he didn’t stream that much (compared to other people in top 10), Tommy gathered more than 130K average viewers on streams for six months, and the peak was a fabulous 650K people. Most importantly, the TommyInnit channel is ranked 7th by peak viewers in the entire history of Twitch, and he’s #2 among streamers by the metric (the leader is TheGrefg with 2.47M peak viewers).
It's hard to overestimate the contribution of DreamSMP and other multiplayer survival servers to the overall progress of Minecraft on Twitch, but they're not the only ones keeping the category at the top of the platform.
XQc and forsen are also the ones helping the game to grow on the platform. Both are not that keen on Minecraft, and the high places are associated with their high average audience who are ready to follow their favorite streamers in any game. It is no coincidence that both of them made it to the top 5: it's all about their rivalry in speedrunning the game. Both regularly break each other's records, and now it is forsen's turn.
Among other streamers, German content creator Trymacs also got into the top 10. Many people still associate Tfue with Fortnite, but over the past six months he streamed for 505 hours in the Minecraft category: it’s more than any other member of the top 10.
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