Last year was a good year for Twitch. It was the first year of TwitchCon, and by some estimates, the service draws over 100 million unique viewers per month and 1.7 million broadcasters. But there’s much more data to share, thanks to Twitch itself.
Twitch published, as has become tradition, a list of its achievements, a Retrospective in one spiffy infographic-style Web page. There’s plenty of numbers to call out, but for the sake of our focus, we’re going to look closely at eSports and events, and the impact Twitch has had in their engagements.
TwitchCon:
TwitchCon attracted 20,000 attendees in its first outing in 2015 in San Francisco. That’s just several thousand shy of GDC attendance numbers in recent years — and all packed into just one Moscone Convention Center hall. About 1.9 million followed along, watching online, likely a metric measuring Twitch viewership.
Zombie MMO game H1Z1 and Twitch were paired for an invitational tournament, with a $170,000 purse, during the con, too. That event within an event drew 2,000 attendees at the theater on-site, and like a tip of the iceberg, was only a fraction of the 190,000 who watched the tournament unfold online.
Events:
Twitch has become an increasingly frequent means by which conference and convention organizers stream content from their show. However, few segments of live events are as ready for the level of excitement a livestream benefits from as eSports tournaments. Twitch included several examples at the ready to demonstrate how extensive its reach has become.
The ESL One – CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) tournament, in Cologne and Katowice, attracted 27 million viewers overall on Twitch, logging 34 million hours (about 3,879 years), peaking at 1.3 million concurrent viewers online. Plenty of hype in that one event by itself, but there’s more. Twitch spotlighted the eSports tournament highlights from BlizzCon, EVO, The International 5 and League of Legends tournament.
Last, but certainly not least, Twitch has worked with different organizations and events, raising about $17.4 million in 2015 for over 55 charities in 2015. Among them is the Games Done Quick event, which prominently features its partnership with Twitch. Alone, the GDQ events raised over $2.8 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders charities.
All in all, it’s an understandably satisfying year for Twitch, just going by the numbers. We’ll keep you posted on Twitch’s work with upcoming conferences, events and, of course, the next TwitchCon.
