Blizzard games still dominate Twitch’s top 20 most-watched streams
Riot Games’ League of Legends and Valve Corps’ Counter-Strike: Global Offensive may have their place staked out as the number one and number two games on Twitch, respectively, but Blizzard Entertainment still remains the dominant game studio on the livestreaming site’s top 20 most-watched games.
Blizzard games accounted for a quarter of the entire top 20 list for the month of September thanks to Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, World of Warcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. For the first time since June, Hearthstone also overtook Dota 2 in viewership rankings to become the third most-watched game on Twitch, showing that the 1v1 card battler is likely not going anywhere anytime soon.
One advantage Hearthstone has over some of the other top games on Twitch is its relatively low barrier to entry, as it is much easier for casual fans to follow the action than on more complicated games like MOBAs, and since it is free-to-play and available on mobile devices, almost anyone can play it. Hearthstone matches are also quick, often lasting for only a few minutes, which makes the game easy to watch for short bursts.
While a few new flavor of the month games like Super Mario Maker and Mad Max popped up on the top 20 for September, it is clear that multiplayer games, especially competitive games, still make up most of the viewership on Twitch. In fact, 85 percent of the games on the list feature multiplayer, and of the three that do not, one is the catch-all “Gaming Talk Shows” category and the other two were newly released that month.
Screenshot by Eric David
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