In the month of December 2022, YouTube Gaming produced the highest amount of live gaming stream hours watched over the past five months, driven primarily by Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, and Fortnite, according to data from Rainmaker.gg, the analytics partner for StreamElements.
But despite the strong end to the year, with 305 million hours watched on YouTube Gaming, the video game streaming arm of the Google-owned platform still lagged behind its major competitors.
Twitch, to no one’s surprise, dominated the entire year of 2022 in livestreaming and still continues to grow at an incredible rate. In December, Twitch amassed 1.602 billion hours watched, though that number actually tied for the lowest amount of hours watched in a month this year on Twitch. Even with Twitch slowing down in the final few months of 2022, the platform is still putting up numbers that double what it had in 2019.
YouTube Gaming, though, still trails behind Facebook Gaming, which is firmly the No. 2 platform for gaming livestreaming. Facebook Gaming outpaced YouTube Gaming every month from August through December. In addition to that, Facebook Gaming amassed 405 million hours watched in December, which more than doubles the “pre-pandemic peak” of 194 million.
But for many of the gaming creators who call YouTube their home, the livestreaming numbers aren’t an alarming concern. For creators like Ludwig and TimTheTatman, they’ve expanded the quantity and quality of their video releases. Ludwig himself has said that “live viewership doesn’t matter at all” on YouTube, and that his uploaded video views have gone up since signing with the platform.
Still, YouTube Gaming likely wants to see the platform at least close the distance with Facebook Gaming in this metric, given the number of big-name creators who have switched over during the past couple of years.
Published: Jan 19, 2023 12:00 pm