In this Gamers be Gamin' Consulting session, we examine a pair of case studies on Twitch interaction.
We provide a brief overview of Steam, the largest online game retailer, and Twitch, the largest community platform for gaming.
We then look at 2 case studies of companies that did or did not use Twitch to market their game:
- LawBreakers did not use Twitch when they could, and perhaps should, have to generate and maintain interest in the game.
- Hunt: Showdown 1986 extensively used Twitch to build up and maintain interest in the game.
To this end, we plotted an interactive timeline showing number of Twitch streams available to watch VS time, with and Hunt game and twtich events listed for 2019-2020, the period they saw the most growth.
We then have a second interactive visualization that can select top 10 games, + Hunt (a top 50 game). The left plot displays average hours streamed per year in the Twitch top 200, VS lifetime review rating. The right plot depicts the hours streamed per month timeseries. The games of interest are selectable from the legend.
Twitch Tracker
Steam Charts
Statista - US Game Sales
Kaggle - Top Games on Twitch 2016-2023*
Steam DB*
* indicates datasets used for this project. The other datasets helped us lead to our final story and are great resources for similar projects.
These provide tons of data for both Twitch and Steam, and can be broken down into many categories (game, genre, release date, hours played, hours watched, etc.)
Using the large amount of data we were able to find, we narrowed it down to these 2 games (LawBreakers, Hunt: Showdown 1986) to explore the following:
- How companies can grow their community and interactivity on Twitch
- How the Twitch community is a good indicator of game longevity
- Benefits of looking at Twitch interactivity within a specific genre
For our study, the genre of the two previous games are described by the tags:
Multiplayer, FPS, Shooter, Difficult, Action