Twitch is sharing some of the numbers behind gamers’ evolving preferences and behaviors over the past year.
Today, Sept. 9, Twitch released its first-ever State of Gaming report, combining metrics and viewership data from the over 8.6 billion hours of gaming content viewed on Twitch between Jan. 1, 2026, and Sept. 1, 2026, with a qualitative analysis informed by Twitch’s years of expertise as the internet’s leading livestreaming platform.
“This is from the horse’s mouth, as it relates to the source data. What we try to add is a layer of insight from our observations, our trends, our internal discussions — experience and observation, but also the research we do,” said Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s the fact that we’re out in the community on an ongoing basis talking to people and getting that input from streamers. I’d like to think that what we’re doing here is a level beyond what a third party can potentially do.”
Twitch’s 2026 State of Gaming report called out growth in several areas of gaming culture, with the horror genre generating 287 million hours watched between January and September 2026. Users watched 93 million hours of content tagged to Twitch’s dedicated Horror tab — a 6 percent increase year-over-year, per the report. Indie games have exploded on Twitch over the past year, with total hours watched for channels tagged for indie game content increasing by 51 percent year-over-year, according to the report, with titles like Meccha Chameleon, Slay the Spire 2, and Big Walk accruing over 348 million total hours watched.
“There are thousands and thousands of new game developers; not all that stuff is great. I think Twitch has a really interesting role there, because the cream will rise to the top,” Minton said. “In an increasingly saturated game market, I think having streamers applying and focusing on indie games, and being able to give people a good look at some of the best stuff out there, is a really interesting trend.”
Minton said Twitch’s 2026 State of Gaming report contains valuable insights for all members of the platform’s ecosystem, including creators, advertisers, and publishers. He flagged the platform’s Drops product, which allows developers to give viewers in-game digital rewards for participating in livestreams, as a source of growing value for both creators and advertisers, with the report revealing that Streams that had used the DropsEnabled tag had generated 1.6 billion hours thus far in 2026, a 46-percent year-over-year increase. During this period, Twitch hosted over 7,500 Drops campaigns — a 20-percent year-over-year bump — and the number of users who participated and claimed Drops increased by 15 percent to 40 million.
“I certainly would encourage streamers to take a day and do something different, and if your game that you stream all the time doesn’t have Drops enabled and you see something else out there that you may want to try and it has Drops enabled, absolutely — because you will get viewers that will stop in, and you may meet some new viewers,” Minton said.
Although Twitch’s 2026 State of Gaming report touts viewership growth for prominent streamers like Nicholas “Jynxzi” Stewart and TheBurntPeanut, Minton said Twitch audiences’ viewership had not broadly shifted more to larger creators, and that Twitch is not currently “more top-heavy than before.”
“There’s no macro shift going on that people have stopped watching smaller streamers,” Minton said.
The State of Gaming report also highlighted Twitch’s most-watched games: League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Grand Theft Auto 5, Valorant, and World of Warcraft. He said GTA in particular was a source of growing interest and engagement on Twitch, with the platform experiencing a spike in livestreamed GTA content following the release of an exclusive extended-look trailer for the game on Netflix on August 27.
“We didn’t know, or at least I didn’t think we knew, until the last minute that creators could co-stream that, so we were not prepared for what that brought, and it broke Twitch — and breaking Twitch is hard,” Minton said. “So, gaming is as big as ever.”