There are many indicators to evaluate whether a new game (produced in 2023) is popular, such as: sales, revenue, number of players online at the same time, etc., among which the popularity on the live broadcast platform also has a certain reference value. The fact that players are willing to invest a lot of time to watch a live stream of a game shows that the product is quite popular and has a good degree of discussion. The doctor took a look, and the popular new games on the domestic live broadcast platform include "Yuan Dream Star", "Sword of the Lily of the Valley" and so on, so what about overseas?
Streams Charts, an overseas live streaming platform analysis website, synthesized the relevant data of multiple mainstream platforms (such as Twitch, kick, etc.) to obtain a 2023 popularity list of new game live broadcasts, and the products on it are sorted by viewers' viewing time. When we ranked the total time spent watching the game in the first seven days of its launch, the top 10 were: Diablo 4, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, Sons of the Forest, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, EA Sports FC 24, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Baldur's Gate 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Street Fighter 6.
We can see that Diablo 4, which has been controversial and received a mixed (69% positive) rating on Steam, is the most popular, accumulating 65.7 million hours of viewing time in its first week of release, while The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur's Gate 3, which have a strong reputation and a media average score of 96 on Metacritic, only rank fifth and eighth. This shows that the word-of-mouth of a game does not determine its popularity for live streaming.
The doctor went to look at it, and the reason why Diablo 4 and Hogwarts Legacy can significantly outperform other products in their first week of cumulative viewing time is because both use Twitch Drop, which encourages players to increase their viewing time to earn in-game virtual item rewards. In addition, we see that the top 10 on the list are basically big-name games, and a lot of money was invested in publicity before the product launch, so it is logical to get everyone's attention.
The above is only the data of the first seven days, when we expand the statistical scope to the whole year of 2023, the top ten on the list have changed, only "Diablo 4" is still the first, with a total of 247.9 million total live broadcast viewing hours! In addition, the game official has also held a lot of interesting online events, which may also be one of the reasons.
After comparing the two charts, the doctor noticed that it was inevitable that the ratings of single-player games would drop sharply after the launch boom, and the typical representatives of them were "Starfield", "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", "Resident Evil 4: Remake" and other works. The most extreme example of this is Starfield, which dropped from 33.5 million hours in September to 1.4 million hours in October, and was still in third place in the first week of the list, but fell out of the top 10 in the annual list.
Finally, the doctor would like to praise the "light of domestic products" - "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", which ranked eighth on the overseas live broadcast platform's 2023 new game popularity list, and also won the TGA Best Mobile Game of the Year Award!