Facebook Gaming Viewership ‘Plummeted’ In 2022 - The first knowledge sharing application in Vietnam

Facebook Gaming viewer numbers have fallen dramatically in 2022, according to Stream Hatchet

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The number of hours spent watching game streams fell in 2022, and there appears to be one very clear loser among the industry’s “big three”: Facebook Gaming.

This month’s Video Game Streaming Trends 2022 Yearly Report from Stream Hatchet revealed that the annual number of hours people spent viewing live gaming content across Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Facebook Gaming has dropped by 13.5% since the end of 2021.

The fall in viewership is less pronounced with Twitch and YouTube, where audience engagement has fallen by single-digit figures (6% and 9% respectively). However, Facebook Gaming endured a torrid year, seeing its viewership plummet by over half–a whopping 54%.

For game-streaming leader Twitch, which routinely gets nearly five times as many viewers as any other competitor, its annual total number of unique channels dropped from 24.4 million in 2021 to 22.4 million in 2022. Stream Hatchet highlighted a potential contributor to this decline: the platform’s plan to change the rate of pay for creators in the coming year, resulting in a noticeable fall in hours watched.

Meanwhile, YouTube Gaming experienced a 9% drop in hours watched over the last 12 months, but it still reports 4.5 billion hours of gaming live streams. Its popularity fluctuated throughout 2022, ranging from a 14% loss in viewership in Q1 to a gain of 4% in Q3, meaning its total viewership remained relatively static throughout the year. While its unique channel number fell by 24%, lead creators TimTheTatman and Ludwig–who made the swap to YouTube Gaming in late 2021–generated over 22 million hours each.

Then there’s Facebook Gaming. Its live-streaming viewership was hit with a sledgehammer in 2022, dropping 56% year on year. Stream Hatchet pointed to one key issue: in Q3, Facebook announced it would be shutting down its standalone gaming app in response to an already declining audience. This gutted the creator base for the company–unique channels dropped by a massive 74% in 12 months, from 2.17 million in 2021 to just 559,000 by the end of last year.

Stream Hatchet

What’s more, it had a massive impact on the most popularly broadcasted titles of the year, resulting in two massive titles dropping out of Stream Hatchet’s top ten streamed games for 2022. Garena Free Fire, the third-most watched game in 2021, and PUBG Mobile (sixth) plummeted off the leaderboard, replaced by popular esports titles CS:GO and Dota 2. Only Mobile Legends: Bang Bang remains the sole game with a majority Facebook Gaming audience in the top ten.

The current state of affairs is all the more surprising given predictions for the industry over the last couple of years. In 2021, Modern Times Group predicted mobile gaming would become a powerhouse of esports, especially in Asia; meanwhile, Steven Salz, co-founder of Rivalry, believed mobile titles would be major players in betting markets. Without a go-to platform to keep them relevant with fans? Perhaps the dream of accessible, competitive gaming could be further off than we think.