Trending on Twitch: Sea of Thieves rides wave of popularity in June

July 1, 2021

by Mitch Reames

Although games, and especially esports, have always had a constantly evolving meta; recently, gaming platforms have also adopted quicker changes in what people are watching -- leading content creators to new games, styles and genres. Twitch has always had a subtle meta but with the explosion in viewers over the pandemic, that meta became more defined as streamers elevated new and old games alike to top places on Twitch.

During 2020, Chess, Fall Guys, Among Us and more have all experienced spikes in popularity leading them to dominate gaming content. Alongside those games is the rise of Just Chatting bringing more variety into the top channels on Twitch as streamers hop in and out of titles with more regularity. Trending on Twitch will be a recurring segment on Nerd Street Gamers as we look at how the Twitch meta changed each month. In April, we looked at the rise of the subathon and in May, Felix “xQc” Lengyel’s dominance was the highlight. Here’s what June showed us.

Methodology note: The stats in this article were compiled by looking at the previous 30 days of Twitch stats on June 29. The data is sourced primarily from SullyGnome but is backed by a mix of Twitch Tracker, Streams Charts, and Twitch Metrics. There are some small differences in stats between sites even when following the same parameters but every stat is close to where it appears on the other sites as well.

With the world opening up, hours on Twitch are decreasing

Throughout the pandemic, Twitch experienced record-high viewership numbers quarter over quarter. Part of the creation of the Twitch meta was due to the insane viewership growth on the platform as a whole. Now, with almost half of the United States fully vaccinated and more normalcy entering life both stateside and abroad, viewership is beginning to decline. The pandemic isn’t over by any means, especially on a global scale, but restrictions are loosening and that, combined with summer weather, is seeing Twitch viewership slide into a summer break.

The total hours watched on the platform in June declined 12% compared to May, a drop of 270 million total hours. That brought Twitch under the 2 billion hours watched mark it reached in May. Still, Twitch’s viewership is up about 300 million hours compared to June 2020, showing how much viewership increased over the past year.

For the top game categories, the top five stayed the same five titles with a small shift as Warzone and VALORANT flipped spots. Every single top five game saw a decrease of over 10 million in hours watched.

Just Chatting -22 million hours watched
GTA V -75 million
League of Legends -21 million
Call of Duty Warzone -10 million
VALORANT -13 million

GTA V (and xQc) may be falling out of meta earlier than expected

Every major game category on the platform saw a decrease, but GTA V’s certainly stands out. Part of it is the unnatural highs the game reached during May, but a drop off of 75 million hours watched is certainly drastic month-over-month. Riot Games' drops for League of Legends and VALORANT can be more easily explained by the lack of major esports events in comparison to MSI and VCT Stage 2 Masters in May.

GTA V doesn’t have big esports events tied to it, but it was bolstered by one channel in particular. XQc still primarily played GTA V in June -- although he mixed in quite a bit of VALORANT -- but his channel is also on a bit of a decline thanks to reaching absurd highs in May.

XQc’s channel saw a decrease of nearly 44% as it dropped from about 39 million hours watched in May to 22 million hours watched in June. Crazy enough, even with that drop, he still had the most watched channel on the platform. Over the last seven days, however, he’s the third-most watched channel. He’s still arguably the most important channel on Twitch these days, but his stranglehold on viewership has slipped quite a bit over the last month.

Only once in Twitch’s history has an individual game’s category had more viewership than League of Legends over an entire year. GTA V has the potential to do so this year.

“I feel like this year, Grand Theft Auto V is going to be the most watched game,” said Ben Goldhaber, one of the founding employees of Twitch, when interviewed for Nerd Street’s podcast Esports Meta in May. “If you go to Twitch, at any time of the day, the top streams are mostly GTA V with this whole role-playing thing. Which is just insane because the game wasn’t built that way, it was modded that way. Once GTA VI comes out, if Rockstar is seeing this and knows what they are doing, they should build in this type of role-playing multiplayer.”

Right now, GTA V currently leads League of Legends by about 100 million hours watched with GTA V at 1,043 million and League at 939 million. GTA needs to maintain its lead over the back half of 2021, but given that the League of Legends World Championship, which usually takes place in October, is always the most watched event of the year, my money is on League continuing with the status quo to stay on top of the platform.

Trending (back) up: Dota 2, Sea of Thieves, and Pokemon FireRed / LeafGreen

In Twitch’s early days, Dota 2 was one of the three dominant games on the platform alongside League of Legends and StarCraft 2. League has stayed on top and StarCraft 2 has fallen to relative obscurity, but Dota 2 remains somewhere in the middle. It has certainly dropped but has stayed a top 10 title consistently.

Over the course of the pandemic, with Valve offering little in the way of communication to the Dota community, the game lost plenty of momentum. But The International is finally coming back this August after the pandemic forced its postponement. As teams work to qualify for Dota 2’s flagship event, viewership is also returning to the title.

Over June, two of the four most watched channels are Dota 2 channels. Dota2mc_ru, a Russian Dota 2 aggregate channel, is the third most watched channel over June and the most watched channel over the last seven days. WePlayDota, which streamed the WePlay Animajor tournament, was only live from June 1 to June 13 and still finished as the fourth-most watched channel of June with 12 million total hours watched.

As a category, Dota 2 went from the 11th-most watched game in May to the eighth in June seeing an increase of 30% or about 15 million hours watched. With The International coming up, Dota 2’s rise will likely continue throughout summer with the game living near the top of Twitch in August.

Dota 2 is the biggest overall game to see a large boost ,but two other games were by far the biggest risers overall. Sea of Thieves, originally put in the spotlight by Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar, saw the biggest increase overall with 4.5 million more hours watched in June compared to May. But this increase was not thanks to Summit1g (he didn’t stream the game at all in June).

The newfound popularity is thanks to an incredible crossover. Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life brings in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean to the Sea of Thieves Universe. Jack Sparrow’s saga is arguably the most iconic piece of pirate media ever made and found its way into a game perfectly fit to house it. Viewership of the game has nearly doubled in June with A Pirates Life only coming out on June 22. It could trail off quickly or it could continue this momentum well into July.

Sea of Thieves received a new expansion but the other riser is an iconic remake of one of the oldest video games made. Pokemon FireRed (and Leaf Green) are remakes of Pokemon Red and Blue, originally released in 1996. The remakes were released in 2004. In the early days, Twitch Plays Pokemon was one of the biggest phenomena on the platform. Now, a Twitch cup featuring effectively Pokemon esports between a bunch of top Spanish streamers is the cause for the rise.

Pokemon went up 4.15 million hours watched in June. Besides Sea of Thieves, no other game went up more than two million. The primary channel boosting Pokemon is Ibai “Ibai” Llanos, one of the Spanish streamers who has helped that region become the king of the million-concurrent-viewership mark.

Lead image credit: Microsoft / Xbox