Viewership for Escape from Tarkov on Twitch has dropped precipitously just one week after it led Twitch with more than 30 million hours watched.
This past week, Escape from Tarkov was the third most-watched game on Twitch, but its 12.85 million hours watched was less than half of what the game had last week.
The initial boom in viewership for Tarkov came due largely to in-game drops that were made available to people who watched streamers play the game on Twitch from Dec. 30 to Jan. 5, so a dip in viewership was predictable.
It wasn’t a matter of “if” Tarkov would see a drop in viewership. It was more about how big the dip in viewership would be as viewers who were only watching for the in-game loot stopped.
Tarkov may have lost more hours watched week-over-week this past week than any other game even had on Twitch from Dec. 30 to Jan. 5, but the fact that it still posted the second-most hours watched of any game on the platform shows that Tarkov isn’t going away so quickly.
Despite the lack of in-game drops this past week, content creators actually streamed the game more than they did the week before. Twitch had a total of 236,009 hours of airtime from streamers in the category, up from 173,321 the previous week, when endemic influencers like Pestily were marathoning the game during the loot drop event.
Tarkov’s popularity among streamers still pales in comparison to games like Fortnite and League of Legends, however. Those two games had 990,320 and 711,957 hours of airtime respectively on Twitch last week.
Both viewership and airtime for Tarkov are up markedly from the week prior to Twitch’s in-game drop event, though. The game’s 98,280 hours of airtime had just 4.1 million hours watched from Dec. 23 to 29. That made it the ninth most-watched category on Twitch for the week.
While Tarkov wasn’t even in the top 20 most-watched forms of content on Twitch in 2019, the game has started off 2020 as the most-watched game through 13 days.
Tarkov may have seen a drop in viewership this past week, but with an increase in interest for the title among influencers, the game has the potential to see viewership stabilize in a way that could keep it among some of Twitch’s more established influencer-driven titles.
