Valorant Blew Away The Competition As Most-Viewed New IP On Twitch In 2020

Streaming platform StreamElements and data and analytics platform Arsenal.gg have released their 2020 State of the Stream report, which highlights the most popular games and streamers for the last month of the previous year, as well as taking a look at the year as a whole. Judging by hours watched, one new game in 2020 that courted fans on Twitch has been a smashing success.

In April, Riot Games tied Valorant beta access to Twitch viewership. That initial seeding might have helped the game become a huge success among viewers, racking up 737 million hours viewed throughout the year, the report said. That number easily dwarfed the #2 most popular new IP on Twitch for 2020, Mediatonic's Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, which managed just 139 million hours viewed. Genshin Impact (#5, 59 million), Hyper Scape (#7, 18 million), Rogue Company (#9, 17 million) and Eternal Return: Black Survival (#10, 16 million) were the other F2P games that made the top 10.

Valorant came in at #5 on the overall list -- technically #4 if you don't count the most popular, but non-gaming, channel "Just Chatting." League of Legends (#2, 1.4 billion) and Fortnite (#3, 904 million) were ahead of it, while Counter-Strike: Global Warfare (#7, 635 million) and Dota 2 (#8, 464 million) trailed behind. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare also made the list at #6, partially aided by the free-to-play Warzone battle royale mode.

Another big takeaway from the report is simply the notable spike in viewership hours across all platforms -- well, except Mixer -- starting in April. All three of the services profiled in the report -- Twitch, Facebook, and DLive -- saw increases of 50-75% after lockdowns started occurring in much of the world in late March and early April. (Don't be fooled by the seemingly larger spike on Twitch's graph; the Y-axis bottoms out at 900 million, as opposed to zero on the other two charts.)

You can get a free copy of the report from its Dropbox site.