2025 was a year of contrasts in gaming. Indies rocked it critically and commercially, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 making history at The Game Awards as the first indie debut to win Game of the Year. But on the flip side, darker times reigned as the industry dealt with massive layoffs that hit thousands of developers at Microsoft, Warner Bros, EA, and more. Despite this chaos behind the scenes, the year brought major releases like ARC Raiders, Monster Hunter: Wilds, and Mario Kart World, alongside the long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Thanks to this mix of high-profile releases and indie darlings, live-streaming viewership stayed strong. But, as we’ll see in a moment, breaking into the top tier of streaming viewership is harder than ever. In this article, we’re showing which games dominated live-streaming in 2025, which new releases made the biggest splash, and how different genres stacked up.
If you’re looking for more macro-scale live-streaming data, check out the full breakdown of 2025’s trends in our FREE 2025 Live Streaming Trends Report:
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet:
- League of Legends pipped Grand Theft Auto V for the top spot this year thanks to 4% YoY growth to 1.95B hours watched
- ARC Raiders saw 129M hours watched in its first 30 days, making it the most watched 2025 launch title by debut viewership
- The First-Person Shooter genre was the most popular among live-streaming audiences with 4.6B hours watched, led by Counter-Strike accounting for 28% of that figure
Long-Established IP Like League of Legends and GTA V Dominated The Top 10 Games
The top of the live-streaming charts in 2025 looks remarkably familiar, with League of Legends holding onto the #1 spot at 1.95B hours watched (up 4.3% from 2024) and GTA V close behind at 1.9B hours watched (despite a slight 4.5% dip). Counter-Strike rounded out the top 3 with 1.28B hours watched, showing a healthy 29.3% growth YoY. The rest of the list reads like a who’s who of live-streaming stalwarts, with VALORANT, Minecraft, Dota 2, Fortnite, and mobile titles like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang and Garena Free Fire.
The only newcomer to crack the top 10 was Roblox, jumping in at #9 with 515M hours watched. This success was thanks largely to the viral success of “Grow a Garden,” one of the platform’s user-created experiences. But this success also spawned more sustainable viewership for other new experiences like “Steal a Brainrot”. What’s notable here is the staying power of these established titles, with most showing modest growth or holding steady. Breaking into this exclusive club of streaming giants continues to seem insurmountable for newer games.
ARC Raiders Led New Releases With a Little Help from Genre Trends
That’s not to say there weren’t new releases in 2025 that shook up the meta, however. ARC Raiders crushed the competition among 2025’s new releases, pulling in 129M hours watched in its first 30 days. That’s a massive lead over second-place Escape from Tarkov at 104M hours watched. The co-op extraction shooter from Embark Studios clearly struck a chord with the streaming community, though genre plays a big role here: Shooters and battle royale titles tend to dominate live-streaming thanks to their inherent watchability and competitive nature. Monster Hunter: Wilds rounded out the top 3 with 74M hours watched, followed by sports title EA Sports FC 26 at 62M.
The mix of AAA and indie titles in the top 10 tells an interesting story. Battlefield 6, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II represent the big-budget side, while Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (which went on to sweep The Game Awards) made it into the broader top 100 alongside horror game R.E.P.O. The presence of Mario Kart World at #10 with 34M hours watched shows Nintendo’s continued ability to generate buzz, even if the Switch 2 launch title couldn’t match the raw viewership of established streaming-friendly genres.
Publishers Try to Reinvigorate Viewership for Old IP With Nostalgia and Fresh Content
In 2025, publishers continued their double-pronged strategy: Breathing new life into existing games through expansions and DLC, while mining their back catalogs for remakes and remasters. Expansions keep live-service games fresh and communities active, while remakes offer a chance to reintroduce classic IP to new audiences. But as the streaming data shows, these strategies don’t deliver equal results.
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Classic dominated the DLC and expansion category with 36.7M hours watched in its first 30 days, more than doubling second-place Hearthstone: Into the Emerald Dream at 13M. The top 5 is notably dominated by Blizzard titles, with Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate and two Hearthstone expansions also cracking the list. RimWorld: Odyssey rounds out the top 5 at 11.2M hours watched, showing that even single-player strategy games can generate solid streaming numbers when they drop major content updates.
The remakes and remasters category tells a different story. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered led with 31.1M hours watched, but the drop-off was steep: Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater pulled in just 4.6M hours watched, followed by Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles at 3.6M. The remaining titles barely cracked 2M hours watched each. Nostalgia alone isn’t enough to drive massive streaming viewership unless the remaster is of a truly iconic title with a large existing fanbase.
FPS Games Lead All Genres, But Market Concentration for Top Games Varies
First-person shooters ruled the live-streaming roost in 2025 with 4.6B hours watched, followed closely by Action-Adventure and MOBAs at 3.8B each. RPGs and MMORPGs tied at 1.9B hours watched, while Shooters (non-FPS) brought in 1.7B and Battle Royales 1.3B. Games were categorized by their primary genre only for this analysis, so there’s no double-counting of viewership. That means a game like Fortnite, which has multiple game modes of different Shooter subgenres.
What’s fascinating is how different genres sometimes are totally reliant on their top titles. Action-Adventure is propped up by GTA V (1.9B of 3.8B, or 50%), and MOBAs are almost entirely League of Legends (2B of 3.8B, or 53%). Even the Shooter genre shows heavy concentration, with Fortnite making up 41% of the total. On the flip side, genres like RPG and MMORPG show healthier competition: Path of Exile 2 represents just 7% of RPG’s total, and Roblox accounts for 27% of MMORPG viewership. While some genres are effectively one-game shows on streaming, others have genuine diversity that could make them more resilient to shifts in player interest (and more appealing for developers trying to break in with new IP).
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2025 proved that live-streaming viewership favors incumbents. League of Legends, GTA V, and Counter-Strike aren’t going anywhere soon, and breaking into the top 10 requires hardcore dedication to community building like with ARC Raiders and TheBurntPeanut. The data also reveals a clear split in how genres function on streaming: Some are effectively one-game shows (League of Legends for MOBAs, GTA V for Action-Adventure), while others like RPGs and MMORPGs show healthier competition that could make them more attractive for new entrants.
For publishers looking to make noise in 2026, understanding these patterns is just the beginning. The Game Awards’ celebration of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 shows that breakout success is still possible, but it requires more than just a great game. It demands a deep understanding of the live-streaming landscape: Which platforms are growing, which streamers are driving discovery, and how viewer behavior is shifting across different game types.
To discover more about platforms, games, and streamers that bolstered the live streaming community in 2025, check out our full 2025 Live Streaming Trends Report for FREE right now:
