Twitch breaks its own record, hits 2.1 billion hours watched in April

Twitch has once again broken its own viewership milestones. April marked the third time the platform has set a record for hours watched in 2021 alone with more than 2.1 billion hours watched, according to data from Rainmaker.gg, StreamElements’ analytics partner.

Meanwhile, Facebook Gaming has remained consistently around the 360,000 million hours watched mark over the last three months after setting its own record to start the year.

For Twitch, a lot of that viewership came from the sustained growth of Just Chatting as a category, which pulled in 283 million hours watched alone. The only other category to even come close was Grand Theft Auto V, which continues to expand its audience despite being released in 2013. 

On the back of its growing roleplaying player base, GTA V finished with 236 million hours watched in April, a 30-percent increase from the previous month. It shot past League of Legends to become the second most-watched category on Twitch. 

League, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Dota 2 were the other games to see some form of growth. Others like Fortnite, CS:GO, and Apex Legends declined slightly while still remaining in the top 10.

Once again, xQc remains the undisputed king of Twitch with around 30 million hours watched during April. That more than doubles every other streamer on the platform outside of Ludwig, Gaules, summit1g, RanbooLive, and NICKMERCS. 

As for most growth, juansguarnizo made his debut on the top 10 most-viewed channels in April thanks to his growing audience and continued support from the GTA V roleplaying community. 

Another big area of growth for Twitch was the Sports category, which surpassed 10 million hours watched for the first time in April. The platform’s Sports Accelerator Program and upcoming Olympics-centric content should continue to push its growth, too.