Report: Twitch is still on top, but Mixer shows remarkable growth [Streamlabs, Newzoo]

Streamlabs and Newzoo have released their third-quarter 2019 Live Streaming Industry Report, their first to reflect Ninja’s recent move from Twitch to Microsoft’s Mixer platform. While Twitch is still by far the most-used streaming service in terms of hours watched and streamed, Mixer has shown some significant growth in the last few months. The number of hours of gaming content streamed on Mixer has tripled since Q2, overtaking YouTube Gaming Live in that key metric for the first time.

Overall, for hours streamed by platform, Twitch leads the pack with 87.3 million hours of content streamed. However, this is where Mixer shows its most significant improvement: at 32.6 million hours, it has almost tripled its time streamed in just three months. YouTube Gaming Live lags behind at 11.1 million hours streamed, a slight drop from Q2.

Another area where Mixer has shown impressive growth is number of unique channels, which nearly doubled to 3.9 million. However, Mixer actually took a slight dip in total hours watched, going from 100.9 million to 90.2 million. This information suggests that Ninja alone is not a big enough draw to attract audiences from other platforms, though his move did perhaps inspire others to create channels and start streaming on Mixer. At any rate, neither Mixer nor YouTube Gaming Live (679.5M) could come close to Twitch’s stratospheric 2,551.4 million hours watched.

As for the games themselves, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Fortnite is still the most-watched game on Twitch, though it continues to be in decline at 223.4 million hours watched. Hot on its heels is Riot Games’ League of Legends with 218.4 million hours watched. Knocking Grand Theft Auto V out of the top three is World of Warcraft, the massively popular 15-year-old MMORPG that recently released the nostalgia-inducing World of Warcraft Classic version that recreates the gameplay experience from pre-expansion vanilla WoW. Overall, WoW publisher Blizzard was the top publisher watched in Q3.

You can read the full report on Streamlabs’ website for even more nitty-gritty details, but overall, a pattern is emerging: though long-established favorites like Fortnite (and the battle royale genre in general) are in decline, they’re not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. And while Mixer has shown some significant improvement, Ninja alone hasn’t yet been enough to topple the reigning champ, Twitch.