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as a media platform is known for its deep connection with gaming companies and videogame culture. So it only makes sense that one of the biggest conventions for the industry, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, plays a vital role for Twitch when it comes around every summer.
Each year, numerous high-profile influencers take time off from their stream to go to the event, but the absence of streamers online doesn’t mean Twitch is lacking content for the week. Instead of watching Tyler “Ninja” Blevins doing the Pon-Pon dance after winning a game of Fortnite , viewers are instead watching game developers and publishers unveil details regarding all of the games and consoles that they’ve been working on for the past year.
This year, the main Twitch channel, which produced live coverage of E3 beginning with pre-expo conferences that took place on Saturday and Sunday before the convention formally began June 11-13, accumulated 4.5M hours watched.
The top session for the week came during the opening conferences that were headlined by Xbox, Bethesda, and Devolver Digital. The livestream of those conferences averaged 213K concurrent viewers over the course of six hours peaking at 391K during Microsoft’s presentation.
It’d be amiss to suggest that that’s the only viewership E3 got on Twitch though, because of the nature of the event, Twitch allowed its personality broadcasters to co-stream E3 coverage to their own streams. So while many people chose to watch more traditional coverage of the conferences, viewers were also able to watch coverage with commentary by influencers like Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek or Saqib “Lirik” Zahid.
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Zahid led all streamers over the weekend who co-streamed under the category of “Special Events” with 414K hours watched and an average of 34K CCV. Overall, Special Events as a category led Twitch with 18.4M hours watched from June 8-13 beating out games such as Fortnite that were missing their top influencers who were instead in attendance at E3.
This year’s event didn’t quite live up to the hype that last year’s E3 set. In 2018, the main Twitch channel pulled 5.9M hours watched from June 9-14 and a specially made “E3 2018” category racked up 23.6M hours watched. The top stream from the week also came during the expo’s opening conferences (June 11) featuring an average of 234K CCV, peaking a 517K CCV.
While viewership of the event was down from 2018, the volatility in viewership could be attributed partially to the excitement surrounding the announcements from this year’s expo compared to last year.
Though top companies like Microsoft and Nintendo make presentations every year, some years there are more significant reveals than others. Last year featured a new Super Smash Bros. installment release date and a new Halo trailer.
This year Nintendo couldn’t match the same sort of hype for less popular games, and Microsoft gave only a vague description of a new console that it is working on. No final name, price, or full specs for the console were disclosed.
Even without the conference matching viewership from 2018, the event took over Twitch for the week showing just how important the expo is to the platform’s wellbeing. Not only do streamers take time off to attend the event, but Twitch, and the gaming industry at large, drop everything for a week to converge in L.A. to see what upcoming videogames and consoles are set to be released.
