You’ve played Fall Guys, right? The sleeper hit of The Summer That Wasn’t from developer Mediatonic? If you haven’t, well, I suggest you give it a shot, if only because it was the second biggest game this month on Twitch — and the second largest debut there this year. (Valorant’s launch in April was bigger, but Fall Guys did manage to beat out Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the second spot.) It sold 7 million copies on Steam and was the most downloaded game ever on PlayStation Plus. Huge!
Among Us has burned up the Twitch charts for last month, too. It’s up a full 650 percent in hours watched from last month, which is good enough to put it at 11th place on the most popular categories on Twitch, just below Minecraft. Expect that number to go up this month.
But let’s zoom out for a second. Twitch itself is growing, too (so is Facebook Gaming; more on that in a sec). According to StreamElements and Arsenal.gg’s monthly report, Twitch, six months on, is still growing. In August, the company posted its first month-over-month rise since April — 1.47 billion hours watched, compared to 1.42 billion in April. That said, it’s still up a full 57 percent year-over-year, which is frankly incredible.
Facebook Gaming is also growing. We’re just about two months out from Mixer’s shutdown and subsequent partnership with the site, and it looks like whatever Facebook Gaming is doing is working: it posted 346 million hours watched in August, a million more than the month before. Year over year, it’s up a full 179 percent. That’s still way off of Twitch, but it’s closing in on YouTube Gaming, which, in April, posted 461 million hours watched.
Other news: cooking shows are gaining popularity on Twitch, and the Food & Drink category on the site is up 96 percent year over year. Vtubers — that’s virtual YouTubers — got a bump from Imane “Pokimane” Anys doing a vtubing stream earlier this month. Félix “xQc” Lengyel is the most popular streamer on Twitch, while Brazilian CS:GO player Alexandre “gAuLeS” Borba, Nick “NickMercs” Kolcheff, and Timothy “TimTheTatman” Betar round out the top four.
Summer was the second season stolen by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We’re six months into a course of disease that shows absolutely no signs of stopping. What I mean to say, really, is that we’re all still inside. Everything is still online. That has, in turn, meant that the virtual platforms we’ve turned to for social engagement haven’t stopped growing. The safest fun you can have right now is playing Among Us with your friends!
Author: Bijan Stephen
Source: Theverge
