Resident Evil Village has seen a huge amount of popularity on Twitch upon release, with large and small streamers jumping at the opportunity to play the new Resident Evil title. The latest iteration in the Resident Evil series, the game has had the most successful launch of any game in the franchise thus far.
Recent Resident Evil titles have had reasonably strong launches on Twitch, with Resident Evil 7 sitting at 224,481 peak viewers on the platform and both Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 3 Remake beating it out at 314,000 and 318,000 viewers, respectively. The successful launch of the game has likely been spurred on by the multitude of memes about one of Resident Evil Village's main antagonists, Lady Dimitrescu, for whom the internet's thirst seemingly knows no bounds.
With a Twitch viewership of over 420,000, Resident Evil Village has already eclipsed previous Resident Evil titles. Streamers such as Hasan and Lirik are certainly partially responsible for this number, but the game has no one streamer to thank, with a huge number of smaller streamers also bolstering the launch viewership. This also means that Resident Evil Village is likely being viewed and played for the actual content of the game, rather than just for the personality of the streamers playing it.
Much of this boost in numbers is likely to do with the rise of Twitch in recent years, with viewership numbers for many new releases being far higher than they've been in previous years as the service gains more popularity. Word-of-mouth has also become an important part of marketing for games, with meme and internet culture helping to spread the word about new titles. The extremely positive response to Lady Dimitrescu may seem like something insignificant, but the huge amount of extra coverage that Resident Evil Village got from the viral content surrounding the character likely helped to propel the game to its large viewership numbers.
As the game is mostly centered on its single-player component, Resident Evil Village's viewership will likely start to drop as players beat the campaign and viewers have seen the entirety of the story on Twitch. Having said that, there is the possibility of another uptick in viewers occurring once the speedrunning community starts to learn the game's route. In any case, Resident Evil Village has already beaten out its predecessors and been a huge success for Capcom, which could mean good news for people hoping for DLC in the future.
Resident Evil Village is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: PCGamesN