If there was any doubt as to the potential of streaming video games, Twitch’s recent look at its 2013 numbers should end that. The site now boasts 45 million unique viewers per month, 6 million broadcasts per month, and more than 12 billion minutes watched per month, all of which are more than double the numbers from 2012. To put that in perspective, Twitch is officially now the world’s largest video game site. By a large margin.
“When video game historians look back on gaming a decade from now, 2013 will be the year they cite as the tipping point of streaming,” Matthew DiPietro, Twitch VP of Marketing, said. “Every major event, publisher, developer, and media outlet in the gaming industry had a presence on Twitch, and streaming became an ever-present piece of the gaming experience. And it’s only going to get bigger.”
Twitch’s numbers are not just impressive, they are staggering for what is still relatively young technology, and there’s no ceiling in sight. With the release of the next-gen consoles, Twitch viewership should continue to grow thanks to how it’s integrated with the new hardware. Since its release on November 15, 2013, 125,000 PlayStation 4 owners have logged on to Twitch, and 20-percent of the broadcasters on the streaming platform between December 23 and January 3 were using PS4s. A dedicated Twitch app is coming later this year for the Xbox One, which further promises to increase Twitch’s reach.
Each month, more than 900,000 unique broadcasters can be found on Twitch, three times the number from 2012. The number of partner channels is also up, with more than 5,100 partners compared to 3,386 during the previous year.
Twitch also broke down what its users are doing on the platform. The top four activities on Twitch are: Watching live streams, of course, which 99-percent of users do; 61-percent also chat with the community; 38-percent watch video highlights; 25-percent broadcast their own gameplay. More than 58-percent of Twitch viewers watch more than 20 hours on Twitch per week.
For a closer look at Twitch’s numbers, including some yearly highlights including its focus on eSports and a breakdown of the $10 million Twitch users raised for various charities in 2012, you can check out their 2013 retrospective.
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