In June 2022, Twitch viewership for most top games decreased, but one game, Valorant, saw a rise. The only significant existing game to see growth in the month was the FPS from Riot Games, as new releases gain popularity.
In the gaming industry, Valorant has become a titan since its release in 2020. The popularity of the game has increased just in 2022. Between March and May of this year, Valorant’s viewership increased steadily. With the addition of the brand-new map Pearl to the map pool, competitive play for the title is as popular as ever.
Twitch’s June 2022 numbers show that the game is performing better than just keeping up, despite worries that it might have trouble keeping up with other popular games. In fact, while many other popular games start to lose their appeal, Valorant seems to be rising to the occasion.
SullyGnome reports that 113 million hours of Valorant were watched on Twitch in June. With an average of 157,000 viewers across all streams and a peak of 984,000 viewers, it was streamed for 3.7 million hours.
It significantly reduced the gap even though it couldn’t beat GTA V for the month. It’s very likely that Valorant will unseat GTA V by the time the July statistics are released.
If this shift in ranking happened, Valorant would reenter the top three for the first time in 2022.
From first to fifth, the top 5 most-watched categories for the month of June were:
Just Chatting, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valorant, GTA V, and League of Legends are some examples.
This month’s top five remain unchanged in terms of position and ranking. However, only one of the five categories listed above—Valorant—showed any growth between May and June, with a slight increase of 1.5% in terms of the total number of hours the game was watched. Even though this growth might seem insignificant, it does indicate that Valorant is, at the very least, likely to maintain its appeal throughout the second half of 2022.
Given that the majority of other top games experienced a significant decline in June, the top five most streamed and watched games on the platform may drastically change over the course of the next six months.