Sea of Thieves gets massive Twitch viewership boost in April amid content update

Despite the resounding success of VALORANT’s beta launch that drew unheard of viewership on Twitch last month, Esports Charts reported today that pirate-themed adventure game Sea of Thieves showed some of the platform’s strongest growth in viewership this past month.

With 3.7 million hours watched from May 4 to 10, the game’s viewership has grown leaps and bounds from the beginning of April. Esports Charts reports that the game’s growth from the beginning of the month could be due in large part to a major content update that launched in the third week of April.

At the same time, the growth over the course of the month came during VALORANT’s debut on Twitch. With the new tactical shooter grabbing everyone’s attention out of the gate, many top content creators were streaming the closed beta because of Twitch drops that fans were itching to get so that they could play the game as well. 

With Summit1g being one of the biggest beneficiaries of Riot’s Twitch drop viewership incentive program, the former CS:GO player spent a vast majority of the weeks following VALORANT’s closed beta release playing the game. 

But with the closed beta only providing a limited amount of content, once all streamers on Twitch were given access to closed beta drops and 24/7 VOD streamers plagued the directory, Summit stepped away from the game.

Esports Charts notes that from April 1 to May 10, Summit was the most-watched Sea of Thieves streamer—and it wasn’t remotely close. With more than 2.8 million hours watched over the time period, he beat the second most-watched streamer by more than two million hours watched.

The more impressive part of Summit’s dominance in the category, though, is that it came despite him not streaming the game until April 23 after he was getting tired of playing VALORANT. So he effectively spotted pace22, the second most-watched streamer in the category, more than three weeks of broadcasts.

This isn’t the first time Summit has given a game the “1g bump.” Last year, he hopped on board the Sea of Thieves ship while everyone else was still playing Fortnite and found success. Shortly after that, he helped push Grand Theft Auto roleplay streaming into the spotlight.