Grand Theft Auto 5, Minecraft, and Fortnite launched YouTube Gaming to new heights during the fourth quarter of 2022. This latest slice of industry data confirms that YouTube Gaming's pandemic-propelled 2020 stats were not its peak, indicating that the platform continued enjoying steady growth over the following two years.
Google's live video service has been expanding its market share at a fairly consistent rate ever since the original YouTube Gaming platform was absorbed into YouTube back in 2018. While virtually all streaming services experienced explosive growth three years back, some industry watchers still characterized the first year of the global pandemic as an anomaly, remaining skeptical of whether such skyrocketing success was sustainable in the medium to long term.
That notwithstanding, it would appear that YouTube Gaming isn't close to plateauing just yet, with the newest State of the Stream report by StreamElements revealing that the platform saw a 25% increase in watched hours over the final quarter of 2022. The data, which was gathered by Rainmaker.gg, shows that this growth can be largely attributed to Grand Theft Auto 5, the most popular game among the platform's viewership in December, with 95 million watched hours. Other notable contributors to YouTube Gaming's stats were Fortnite, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends, which combined for a total of 216 million watched hours across that period, as per the same source.
The latest State of the Stream report doesn't delve into the specifics of individual channels, though another industry watcher already revealed the most watched YouTube streamers for 2022. According to that mid-January report, the videos from content creator Darren Watkins Jr.—better known as IShowSpeed—racked up nearly 40 million watched hours over the course of the previous year. Assuming even seasonal viewership distribution, Watkins Jr. is responsible for over 1% of YouTube Gaming's December 2022 watch hours all on his own.
In spite of YouTube Gaming's impressive growth, Twitch remains by far the most dominant platform in the streaming space. While Google's offering counts its quarterly watch hours in the hundreds of millions, the Amazon-owned service does so in the billions. More specifically, Twitch's fourth-quarter watch hours totaled nearly 5 billion, the new State of the Stream report reveals.
Even though the industry leader nearly doubled this key metric compared to its 2019 pre-pandemic levels, the platform also appears to have peaked sometime in the last year and is currently hovering at around 1.6 billion watch hours each month. Given the fact that many high-profile streamers moved to YouTube in recent times, it would appear that at least some of its 2022 growth came at the direct expense of Twitch.
Source: StreamElements