RPGs have some of the strongest debut viewerships on live streaming. While it’s usually flashier titles like ARPGs (Elden Ring) or JRPGs (Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth) that capture viewers’ attention, sometimes simple dedication to realism with choices that truly matter works best. This has certainly been the case with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – the follow-up to developer Warhorse Gaming’s original Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game praised for its immersive world-building in a grounded, medieval setting.
In this article, we’re looking at the debut performance of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 on live streaming, with a focus on its implications for publisher Deep Silver’s future games and medieval games more generally.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Proves Itself a Worthy Successor
Off the bat, loyal fans of the series proved their commitment by turning out in droves. In its debut week, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 brought in 25.1M hours watched with an average viewership of 144K. With a whopping 636K peak viewers tuning in, the game proved this was more than just a niche group showing their interest. As mentioned, part of the game’s appeal are the large regions with beautifully crafted villages that feel more like walking through the English countryside than some heightened fantasy world.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is particularly well-suited to live-streaming audiences for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s a steep learning curve where players need to actually develop their fighting skills rather than relying on experience points to progress through difficult encounters. This makes the game brutally demanding of players’ time, inclining time-pressed viewers to watch playthroughs instead of jumping straight into the game. Secondly, the game offers a seamless experience where even failed pathways lead to interesting interactions that feel organic. This makes every streamers’ playthrough entirely different, lending itself to unique experiences from player to player.
The top streamers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 feature an array of different languages. The top streamer was Brazilian streamer alanzoka with just over 1.1M hours watched, closely followed by the lesser-known Czech streamer Agraelus with just under 1.1M hours watched. These two streamers are representative of the other most popular Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 streamers, being a mix of big-name streamers that try out every hyped game and smaller, dedicated streamers. Interestingly, Korean streamers also took to the title on Chzzk, including 풍월량 (Poong Wol-ryang) and 한동숙 (Han Dong-suk).
Publisher Deep Silver is Cracking the Code to Live Streaming Success
Publisher Deep Silver must be over the moon with the phenomenal success of their latest game. In fact, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the best performing title in its debut week among Deep Silver’s catalog, with the aforementioned 25.1M hours watched – nearly three times the watch time of its next best title Dead Island 2 with 8.8M hours watched. The original Kingdom Come: Deliverance came in shortly behind that with 8.7M hours watched. Deep Silver has slowly made a name for itself as a publisher of games with strong live-streaming potential.
In fact since 2022, Deep Silver’s games have all had fantastic debut performances. Part of this success can be attributed to well-executed live-streaming integrations, bonding the games’ communities together for important updates and announcements. Take, for example, the launch of Hunt: Showdown 1896, an upgrade to the base Hunt: Showdown game. To better explain the number of changes in this new update, Deep Silver organized an extensive Twitch Drops campaign that offered in-game loot to viewers who tuned in to participating streamers. Apart from clarifying what exactly Hunt: Showdown 1896 entailed, this campaign also boosted viewership after it was over, having turned viewers into new players.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Heralds The Revival of Interest in Medieval-style Games
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 hasn’t just performed well among Deep Silver’s own games: It has outperformed even the most well-known games on Steam with a medieval aesthetic (as defined by Steam’s user-generated tagging system). Looking at the 10 medieval-themed games with the highest all-time concurrent players counts (according to SteamDB), Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 came in second place with 256K concurrent players (behind only The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim with 287K concurrent players at its peak). This matches the game’s sales, hitting over 1M copies sold in under 24 hours. This is an incredible performance considering that the competition includes titles like Dragon’s Dogma 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Crusader Kings 3.
But of greater importance to us, this success directly correlated with live-streaming viewership. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s peak viewership of 636K puts it in second place among the same group (again coming behind Skyrim with a peak viewership of 1M). Keep in mind, however, that peak viewership data has only been pulled from 2019 onwards, explaining why games like Crusader Kings 2 are lower than one might expect (at just 14K) while games that released in that time are higher (such as Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord with 277K). Still though, peering between these effects, there does seem to be a strong link between popular medieval-themed games also finding live-streaming audiences (all generally being RPGs). Note there are some major exceptions to this data due to missing tags, such as city-builder Manor Lords which also demonstrated renewed viewer interest in realistic medieval settings with a peak viewership of 142K.
Deep Silver now has a couple of well-recognized IPs in its library, and will no doubt want to use these as pillars of its gaming strategy moving forward. Hopefully, though, we’ll see further experimentation with live-streaming integration to further popularize their series. Realistic medieval games, meanwhile, will continue to experience popularity and hopefully branch out into other genres.
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