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Twitch viewership saw decline for the fourth straight month in April 2022

Games like Elden Ring were still enjoying major viewership in April, but numbers were still down month-to-month as outside activity spins up again.

TJ Denzer

May 18, 2022 12:40 PM

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Twitch viewership skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of folks not being able to go anywhere, events being canceled, and a lot of stuff pivoting to digital made for the perfect storm of major interest in livestreaming and viewership across most major platforms. Viewership is still doing better than it did before the pandemic began, but as activity continues to resume across the world, it’s been on a downward trend. StreamElements State of the Stream shows that April 2022 was the fourth month in a row to see viewership numbers drop.

StreamElements posted its April 2022 State of the Stream report with data from its analytics partner at Rainmaker.gg on May 18, 2022. There’s still a lot going on in livestreaming. Surprisingly, despite being a mostly single-player experience, Elden Ring managed to remain in the top 10 of topics watched with around 36 million hours of viewership. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto 5 saw a major uptick in viewership during April, up 60 percent for around 127 million hours of viewership. This is likely due in major part to the fact that GTA5 and GTA Online saw current gen version releases on Xbox Series X/S and PS5.

Despite these impressive numbers, April 2022 was the fourth month in a row that saw livestream viewership trend downwards. Twitch saw a major spike in January 2022, but has never gotten back to the highs it saw in the midst of the pandemic, which saw all-time record viewership during May 2021. Even so, viewership still sits higher than pre-pandemic numbers. April 2022 still managed to pull in over 1.5 billion hours watched overall. Facebook Gaming tells a similar story, declining once again over the last four months, but still pulling in higher viewership than pre-pandemic months with over 300 million hours watched.

With so much more interest in livestreaming and its viewership than back in 2020, it seems unlikely that viewership will ebb off to anything like what we saw pre-COVID-19. Even so, it will be interesting to see if viewership on platforms like Twitch continue to decline over the coming months.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.