Looking at the numbers, Twitch is still the leader in viewership, with a total of 728 million hours. Nonetheless, its market share dropped by 6 percent, from 67.1% to 61%.
Facebook gaming was able to see a 210% growth in viewership per month in December, getting 8.5% market share compared to the previous year’s 3.1%, shows StreamElements and Arsenal.gg data.
Twitch Is Still in the Lead, Even With a Market Share Drop to 61%
Even with that 6% drop in market share, Twitch was still a the top when it comes to streaming games.
The most popular category in December became ‘Just Chatting,’ with nearly 81 million hours, which is pretty huge considering League of Legends got 74.1 million hours, and Fortnite only 58.3 million hours. The most-watched streamers were Felix “xQc” Lengyel and Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar.
In the last two months of 2019, Twitch streamer ‘xQc’ was the number one watched streamer, but nobody knows what the future holds since the viewership can shift at any time depending on the games, we’ll see launched in the incoming months.
StreamElements stated that the top 10 games are your “usual suspects,” and two new games made it to that top – Path of Exile and Escape from Tarkov. The second-biggest game streaming service in 2019 was YouTube Gaming, reaching 27.9% share.
Meanwhile, Facebook is just beginning to step into the gaming universe by investing in the Cloud game streaming market. Back in December, the social media giant had acquired a video gaming start-up from Madrid called PlayGiga for nearly $78 million. The most recent games released on the Instant Games platform are Pokemon Tower Battle and Pokemon Medallion Battle.
The report from StreamElements noted that Facebook Gaming’s rise is due to streamers that want to build a bigger audience on the social media platform, but also due to new faces.
