By Amos We

Ever since the beginning of the global pandemic, the gaming industry has been one of the biggest winners. Thanks to several lockdowns where we all get stuck at home, gaming consoles, physical and digital video games, and live streaming platforms have all been observed with significant growth in sales and popularity. 

Talking about gaming, we have Nintendo Switch dominating the market and PS5 keeps running out of stock. On the other hand, we have Among Us and Fall Guys went viral overnight, while in the case of video game live streaming, it is impossible to ignore the powerhouse live streaming platform Twitch. 

Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, is currently the most popular live streaming platform focusing on gaming. According to Streamlabs, in the first quarter of 2021, Twitch generated 6.3 billion watching hours in total. It’s a new milestone for Twitch as that’s a huge 97% increase compared to the first quarter of 2020 – in other words, its viewership almost doubled in one year.

To put that number in the market, Twitch has dominated 72.3% of total hours watched among its biggest competitors. To draw a comparison, the second and third biggest live-streaming platforms – YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming – have only generated 1.4 billion and 1.1 billion respectively. Far less than Twitch even with both of them combined.

According to TwitchTracker, Grand Theft Auto V, which represented around 11.6% of the hours watched on Twitch, is the biggest gaming attraction among all its competitors. The classic League of Legends and the battle royale game Fortnite are some honourable mentions which represented 7.5% and 4.1% approximately. 

However, while gaming is Twitch’s biggest focus, the category that generated the most viewership in April is not any of the video games aforementioned. On top of Grand Theft Auto V is ‘Just Chatting’, a lifestyle section where streamers can just interact with the audience without playing any video games. It shows that other than gaming, Twitch is also a platform for lifestyle, music and esports broadcast. 

Despite the fact that the category ‘Just Chatting’ shows a rise of 44% since Q1 2020, when we look at the whole picture the topic merely represents around 12.6% of the viewership. ‘Music’ represents 1.1%, while the remaining 86.3% all belongs to video games.  

Meanwhile, according to New York Times, gamers spent over $56.9 billion last year in the United States alone. By the way, if you’re linking that stat to the sales of PS5, the gaming console that costs an arm and a leg wasn’t released until November 2020. Hence, the gamers’ money definitely went elsewhere. 

Twitch is a good place to spend, don’t you think? 

One way for the streamers to earn is through subscriptions. It’s worth noting that “follow” and “subscribe” are two different things on Twitch. To follow a channel, is to start seeing his or her livestream on our feeds – the common understanding of “follow” as on other social media platforms. On the other hand, different from YouTube, we actually have to pay to subscribe to a channel on Twitch. 

By subscribing, you gain access to the use emotes (special emoticons made by the particular streamer), special badges alongside your name, ad-free viewing, and exclusive chatrooms if the streamer you subscribe to ever created one. 

So instead of asking what you’ll get for subscribing, ask what the streamers will get, as subscription works more like financial support to the streamers. As a matter of fact, streamers get 50% of the subscription fee, while the remaining goes to Twitch. 

Alternatively, while Amazon is the platform’s parent company, a free self-promotion subscription service – Twitch Prime – is also available for Amazon Prime or Prime Video users. With Twitch Prime, users are allowed to subscribe to a channel for free each month.  

Ludwig Ahgren, with around 280k subscribers, is now the most subscribed person on Twitch. How? Funny you should ask.  

Ludwig has just completed a 31-day live stream on the platform nonstop starting from the 14th of March. When I say ‘nonstop’, I mean it. He had been living his life in front of his camera, from eating to sleeping, for the entire month. It was a challenge called ‘subathon’ (subscription marathon) which encouraged viewers to subscribe. For each subscription he gained, he would add 10 seconds (started as 20 seconds) to the livestream. The countdown once reached a peak of 37 hours before he had to set a 31-day cap – fair enough, we wouldn’t want it to be endless, right? 

His viewership peaked on the 14th of April, as 165,293 viewers watched him ending the record-breaking live stream. Since the subathon, he’s gained around one million followers.

As he joked about “swimming in” all the money got, he had donated more than one million dollars (£725,000) for charity after his live stream ended. A happy ending after all.