Valorant only major game growing on Twitch in June as LoL, GTA suffer slump

While most major games have suffered a decline in Twitch viewership in June 2022, one game has thrived: Valorant. As new titles gain traction, the Riot Games FPS was the only major existing game to experience growth in the month.

Since releasing in 2020, Valorant has grown into a juggernaut in the gaming space. In 2022 alone, the game has continued to grow in popularity. Across March and May of this year, viewership for Valorant grew at a steady rate.

Competitive play for the title is as popular as ever, with brand new map Pearl entering the map pool in a big change-up for players.

Despite concerns that the game may struggle to keep up with other big titles, Twitch’s June 2022 numbers indicate it is doing more than just keeping up. In fact, Valorant appears to be rising up to the challenge while many other popular titles begin to sink in popularity.

According to SullyGnome, Twitch viewers watched Valorant for 113 million hours in June. It was streamed for 3.7 million hours, with an average of 157,000 viewers across all streams and a peak of 984,000 viewers.

While it was unable to topple the likes of GTA V for the month, it significantly narrowed the gap. By the time the July stats come around, it is highly likely that Valorant will knock GTA V off the number three spot. If this change in positioning was to occur it would mean Valorant re-entering the top three for the first time in 2022.

For the month of June, the top 5 most-watched categories, ranked from first to fifth, were:

• Just Chatting
• League of Legends
• GTA V
• Valorant
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

In terms of ranking and positioning, this top five is unchanged from the previous month. However, of the five categories above, Valorant was the only one to show any growth from May to June, with a slight increase of 1.5 percent in relation to the number of hours the game was watched overall.

• Read more: Valorant Sentinel agent concept would be a perfect Episode 5 addition

While this increase may seem small, it does show that Valorant is still at the very least, likely to maintain its popularity going into the second half of 2022.

With most other major titles showing major decline for June, the next six months could see a giant shake-up in terms of which games make it into the top five most streamed and watched titles for the platform.

How other titles have stacked up in June 2022

In particular, League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive took a massive dip in relation to the number of hours those games were watched throughout the month. LoL has taken a 25.6 percent dip, while Counter-Strike has almost halved its hours watched with a decline of 39.99 percent.

Similar to Counter-Strike, Apex Legends had a 38.2 percent decline in hours watched for the month of June. The amount of hours Apex Legends was streamed also dipped by almost 20 percent which is likely to be a large contributing factor to why it was viewed a lot less in June.

Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone also declined by 5.6 percent and 8.1 percent respectively.

For new releases, Supermassive’s The Quarry has had a successful first month on Twitch, finishing in the top 20 and amassing almost 20 million hours watched. Given the game was released in the second week of June, July could see these numbers increase as well.

On the flip side, certain games of interest have seen a major rise in the rankings for June. Since going free to play, Fall Guys has jumped up an astronomical amount and has seen an increase of hours watched by almost 400 percent.

Teamfight Tactics has also seen a staggering rise this past month, with hours watched up over 150 percent as well as average viewers jumping up by 160 percent.

• Read more: Twitch adds first Just Chatting exclusive feature to bring viewers closer to streamers

Minecraft has similarly seen an increase across all stats for June, with hours watched and average viewers both rising over 50 percent.