Twitch users spent 292bn minutes watching streamers in 2016, Overwatch most watched new game

Twitch has released its interactive 2016 Year in Review, revealing that users spent 292bn minutes watching Twitch last year, and that Blizzard’s Overwatch was the most-watched new game of 2016. To put that in more quantifiable terms, that’s 4.86bn hours, or 555,555 years.

Twitch’s favourite shooter overall remained Counter Strike: Global Offensive, but Blizzard’s smash hit team shooter has remained a permanent fixture in Twitch’s top ten ever since it launched.

Twitch also had 2.2m unique streamers last year, and a massive $25.3m was raised for charity on the platform, showing a growth of 48 per cent year-on-year compared to the amount raised in 2015. As MCV’s previously reported, $2.58m of that figure was raised by Yogscast’s Jingle Jam charity drive, but $9m was raised by Extra Life for the Children’s Miracle Network. Games Done Quick also raised $2.51m.Have a look at the infographic below for a complete breakdown.

Over a million free Twitch Prime channel subscriptions were used last year, and Twitch also raised $500,000 in its Prime subscription charity drive. Elsewhere in the retrospective, over 14.2bn chat messages were sent, and 153m whispers were sent. The Kappa was the most-sed emote, totalling 413m uses, and 10 per cent of chats used the Auto Mod feature.

Pokemon Go was the first mobile game to reach the top of the Twitch charts, and farming simulator Stardew Valley was one of the top ten new releases of the year. Meanwhile, Uncharted 4 was one of Twitch’s most popular PS4 games of 2016, and Minecraft was one of Twitch’s top-ten most watched and streamed games of the year.

Looking to Twitch’s achievements this year, the platform recently launched its new Communities feature. This allows users to easily find content that’s relevant to their interests, and it’s also designed to help streamers identify their keenest audiences.