According to the latest Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet report on the live streaming environment, the number of hours streamed and watched on Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming has decreased significantly in the past months. Streamers across the three platforms spent 273 million hours live between April and June. This represents a 19.4 percent decrease from the second quarter of 2021 and a 12 percent decrease from the previous quarter.
Viewers watched 7.36 billion hours across three platforms in the last quarter. This means a decrease of 18.1 percent on a yearly basis and 8.4 percent compared to the previous quarter. The slowdown on all three platforms may be related to people spending more time outside for epidemic-related reasons than last year.
Twitch is still by far the biggest name of the three platforms, with 76.7 percent (5.64 billion) of watch hours and 92.7 percent (204.2 million) of streaming hours. While these numbers represent a decrease of 13.4 percent and 16 percent compared to the second quarter of 2021, the number of unique channels broadcasting on the platform decreased by approximately 2 million to 9.6 million.
But Twitch’s Just Chatting category continues to strengthen. Hours watched in this category increased by 2.2 percent compared to the previous quarter, making the category the highest number of viewers ever. The most watched categories were Grand Theft Auto V (465 million hours) and League of Legends (464 million).
YouTube Gaming viewing, on the other hand, remained stable compared to the previous quarter, dropping by 13.1 percent compared to the second quarter of 2021 to 1.13 billion hours. Total broadcast hours fell 9.6 percent year on year to 8.05 million.
Facebook Gaming suffered a bigger setback, according to the report, despite Meta’s efforts to attract content developers. The number of hours watched fell by 51 percent compared to a year ago, to 580 million. In terms of streaming hours, it fell from 20.8 million in the second quarter of 2021 to 7.9 million in the last quarter, an even larger decrease of 62 percent.
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