David Farnor | On 04, Aug 2017

While Netflix and Amazon continue their battle to be the biggest streaming presence in your living room, there’s another battle quietly raging for eyeballs in your home: the battle of the gaming giants.

Ever since Amazon bought live-streaming platform Twitch, the race between YouTube and Twitch to become the most popular service among gamers has been an intense one. Each of them frequently announce new features and new ways to monetise streaming feeds from videogames to fans – and, despite some slowdown in growth last year, the audience shows no sign of going away, as the latest quarterly report from Streamlabs shows that users are once again on the up.

Indeed, the number of streamers rose 53% in Q2 2017 to 514,000 for Twitch and YouTube Live – to put that in perspective, that’s far ahead of social live-streaming platforms, such as Facebook Live and Periscope, both in terms of broadcasters and viewers.

YouTube Live is growing at a “healthy” rate of 51 per cent compared to the first quarter, slowly making gains on its rival. Indeed, compared to January 2017, YouTube has doubled its number of monthly active streamers – not bad going, considering the controversies surrounding its Restricted Mode filters and extremist content online.

Twitch, though, continues to speed ahead, growing by 54 per cent quarter-on-quarter, thanks to new updates to its search and discovery interface and enabling smaller channels to earn money.

The most popular games? League of Legends remains the most dominant title, with over 500K unique streamers over the quarter, making it the number on game on Twitch, bringing in $1.96M in tips. Overwatch was the second, with over 300K unique streamers, bringing in more than $900k in tips, and streamed by more than 330K unique streamers.

As Microsoft’s new platform, Mixer, and Facebook Live continue to grow, BBC Three embraces eSports, and StreamLabs adds more data to its reports, can anyone topple Twitch from its gaming tower in the next year?

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