Twitch viewership holds steady in Q3 2023, Q4 off to strong start | Streamelements

Twitch viewership held steady in Q3 2023 according to StreamElement’s latest State of the Stream report. According to their data partner Rainmaker.gg, total hours watched grew less than 1% to 5.15 billion in Q3 2023 compared to Q2’s 5.14 billion total.

However, this growth is primarily due to the third quarter having an extra day. The games livestreaming service averaged 56 million daily hours watched in Q3. This is about 1% fewer hours watched per day than Q2’s 56.5 million average.

While it’s too early to know how Q4 will fare, October is setting the bar high. Last month, viewers watched on average 57.2 million hours of Twitch content each day. October was the third best month of 2023, falling just short of July (57.3 million daily hours watched) and January (57.5 million daily hours watched).

“Twitch is off to a strong start in Q4 with its second highest amount of monthly and daily hours watched compared to the previous two quarters,” said Or Perry, cofounder of StreamElements. “A lot of this was driven by competitive gaming titles such as League of Legends’ Worlds, Dota 2’s The International, and Counter-Strike 2 getting its highly anticipated update.”

Top Twitch categories

Twitch’s top categories didn’t move much in September and October. Nine of the top ten games in September made the top ten the following month.

Both Starfield and EA Sports FC 24 debuted in September. Respectively, these titles had the fifth and sixth biggest launch weeks on Twitch this year according to StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg. While Starfield had a bigger launch week than EA Sports FC 24, the rebranded soccer title brought in more Twitch viewership across the whole month. This is expected as single player titles do not have the same streaming longevity as competitive live service games.

Esports events explain the largest gains made in October 2023. IEM Sydney and Blast Premier’s European and American Fall Showdowns helped Counter-Strike’s hours watched grow 88% from September. Similarly, Dota 2’s annual championship, The International, boosted viewership by 87%. Additionally, League of Legends viewership was boosted by Worlds 2023.

Top streamers

Twitch’s top creators continues to be very dependent on how many hours streamers are broadcasting. Case in point, KaiCenat took the top spot in October by streaming 45% more hours on the site.

Notably, Twitch’s most watched streamers are becoming increasingly international. In September, the top ten included Portuguese, Korean, French, German, Spanish and Japanese speaking creators. Similarly, October’s top channels included Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and German speaking creators.