State of the Stream December 2022: upward trend vs pre-COVID

StreamElements has released their final State of the Stream for 2022. Using Rainmaker.gg’s data, the report shows that streaming hours watched have seen healthy growth compared to 2019, but it failed to reach the heights of 2021. This adds to the general consensus that 2022 was a corrective year for the gaming industry at large.

Twitch is still the top platform for gaming live streams and its not even close. In 2022, more than 21.5 billion hours were watched on the platform. In 2021, Twitch set a new annual record, pulling in about 24 billion hours watched. While this is about 10% fewer hours watched than last year, this is still more than double 2019’s 10.2 billion. Twitch clearly retained many of these new pandemic-era viewers through this corrective year.