August was a strong month for streaming platforms across the board with Twitch bouncing back from two straight months of declining watch time and Facebook Gaming setting a new viewership record.
For Facebook, this continues a strong period of growth dating back to April, hitting a record high 567 million hours watched in August just one month after breaking the 500 million hour mark in July, according to Rainmaker.gg, StreamElements’ analytics partner.
Twitch remains the streaming industry’s leading platform by a large margin, reaching over 1.9 billion hours watched again and stopping a recent skid after a slow June and July drop-off that brought the platform below the two billion hour threshold for just the second time in 2021.
As for top performers, Just Chatting is slowly encroaching the 250 million hours watched mark and is the most viewed category on the platform by more than 100 million hours. Grand Theft Auto V and League of Legends continue to fight for that second slot at 142 million and 133 million hours watched, respectively.
Apex Legends is the biggest mover of the month, having jumped more than 103 percent in viewership thanks to the Emergence launch, sitting in fourth place at 86 million hours watched. VALORANT rounds out the top five at 73 million hours.
In terms of individual streamer performance, xQc reclaimed his Twitch viewership throne after Asmongold broke a seven-month streak, sitting at just under 20 million hours watched.
Asmongold remained in the top 10 for August, largely in part due to the continued viewership battles between World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. In fact, his viewership swung the race in August, with FFXIV leading WoW by four percent since he accounted for more than four million hours watched in the category.
“Their roles would have been reversed if WoW star Asmongold hadn’t switched games since he represented over 4 million of the hours watched of Final Fantasy and illustrates the impact top content creators have on the popularity of games on Twitch,” co-founder of StreamElements Doron Nir said. “With Asmongold taking a break at the start of September, WOW has already moved ahead. The big question now is which top streamers are going to help the highly anticipated New World rise above them both when it launches this month.”
Auronplay, loud_coringa, NICKMERCS, and ibai make up the remaining top five channels, pulling in between 10 and 15 million hours watched each.
