Audience of gaming live streaming grows in the 1st quarter of 2023

The results are in! And they are promising: the main platforms for gaming live streaming grew again in audience in the 1st quarter of 2023.

According to a report by the StreamCharts website, the main gaming live streaming platforms showed growth in the first three months of the year, compared to the last three months of 2022.

The highlight was Kick, one of the newest platforms, a direct competitor of Twitch. In the first quarter of 2023, Kick entered the Top 10 most popular live streaming platforms for the first time with a total of 58.01 million hours watched.

Of this number, still very small compared to Twitch’s, Kick’s highlight was the month of March, a period in which the platform was in the middle of several online conversations. In March alone, Kick reached an audience of more than 33 million hours watched, thanks to the launch of its mobile application.

Kick audience Q1 2023 — Picture: StreamCharts

The fall of Facebook Gaming’s streaming audience

Still popular in the Asian and Latin American markets, Facebook Gaming has once again seen a dip in its quarterly viewership.

With 255.4 million hours watched in the 1st quarter of 2023, the number was 31% lower than in the last three months of 2022. This is the biggest quarterly audience drop among all major game live streaming platforms.

YouTube Gaming growth

With the help of several Twitch streamers, who started to migrate to YouTube, YouTube Gaming saw significant growth in the first three months of 2023.

Google’s gaming live streaming platform grew 13% compared to the last quarter of 2022 and reached 1.383 billion hours watched. This number does not include audience data from YouTube Live, streams on Google’s platform not related to games.

Overall, counting all live stream viewership, YouTube leads the market with 8.123 billion hours watched in Q1 2023, versus Twitch’s 5.281 billion. However, when it comes to games, the Amazon platform wins handily: the audience of gaming broadcasts on Twitch hit 4.257 billion hours watched.