Halloween has become a holiday on par with Christmas in terms of marketing potential, hyping up players, streamers, and viewers alike with a bevy of spook-themed new games and events. Across all forms from film to gaming to now even music, creative industries are leaning on Halloween to bolster their engagement in an increasingly crowded entertainment space vying for consumer attention.
Live streaming is adopting the same strategy: “Live stream Halloween” sees streamers collaborating to scare or support one another through terrifying experiences. Halloween on Twitch, for example, builds off of the many horror games released during October and the plethora of Halloween-themed emotes and overlays to redesign its aesthetic.
In this article, we’re looking at how Halloween and horror-themed games in general are performing on live streaming, including unique ways streamers and the Twitch platform itself can capitalize on horror content.
Halloween Twitch Thrives on Horror Game Content
Horror games can be hard to pin down, with some purely horror titles focusing on gameplay (scares, tension, survival) while others simply adopt the trappings of the horror genre (gothic motifs, gore, monsters). For the purposes of this analysis, we’ve looked at every game tagged with the “horror” theme from the IGDB – the most robust and accurate database of horror games publicly compiled.
In the past 12 months, horror games have generated an incredible 836M hours watched across Twitch, YouTube, and Kick, with a peak viewership 471K. Incredibly, this comes from just 1.2M hours of airtime, which means horror content is quite efficient at generating viewership compared to games with longer runtimes and higher investment such as RPGs. We cover in more detail below how horror stacks up against viewership on these platforms overall.
During October 2023 alone, streams specifically tagged “Horror” generated 15.3M hours watched while streams tagged “trickortreat” pulled in 6.7M hours watched. The holiday-themed tag shows support from the live-streaming community, backing up a litany of Halloween Twitch overlays and Halloween Twitch emotes created and sold to streamers rallying behind the Halloween marketing push. With live streaming and gaming so closely entwined (such as Discord with its full Halloween costuming), it makes sense that creators would be willing to put in the effort to create spooky content for the occasion.
Top Halloween Steam Games and Horror Streamers
Throughout 2024, a number of legacy horror titles continued to pull in hours on live streaming. Coming in first is Dead by Daylight with 238M hours watched: The asymmetrical PvP survival game thriving off its film IP integration and a celebrity cameo from Nicholas Cage. To put that figure in perspective, that means Dead by Daylight accounts for roughly 28.5% of all horror game viewership over this past year! Co-op games also drew in massive viewership, with last year’s Halloween success Lethal Company and pandemic-era hit Phasmophobia bringing in 102M and 26M hours watched, respectively. All three of these titles prove how sharing the horror experience is crucial to success on live-streaming platforms.
A couple of other trends emerged across the most popular horror titles. Games that effectively employ horror theming to spruce up violent gameplay can be a big success. Take, for example, Diablo IV (which got a big bump in viewership this Halloween thanks to the release of the Vessel of Hatred DLC) and The Hunt: Showdown 1896 (an expansion of the original The Hunt: Showdown which cleverly utilized a Twitch Drops campaign to drive hype among streamers). Remakes of classic horror titles also performed well, including the ever-popular Resident Evil 4 remake and the new Halloween release Silent Hill 2 Remake with 28M and 17M hours watched each.
Horror games are, of course, a staple of many streamers’ content. Streamers who committed themselves to some of the aforementioned most popular horror games on Twitch were rewarded for their expert knowledge with tonnes of viewership. Ranking by horror game viewership over the past 12 months alone, the most popular streamer was Rob2628 with 7.9M hours watched. He hit this figure by almost purely covering Diablo IV – in fact, his viewership accounts for over 10% of all Diablo IV viewership over the same time period! Some other big-name streamers also made it onto this list, like Elajjaz who has fully engaged with Halloween by playing Resident Evil 4 and Lethal Company, plus caseoh_ with his recent playthrough of Massacre at the Mirage.
Halloween and Big Releases Crucial for Horror Game Streaming Popularity
Horror games naturally see a spike in popularity on live-streaming platforms during October for Halloween. In 2024 alone, viewership for horror games doubled as a result of Halloween from September to October. 2023 also saw a spike in demand, but the effect was somewhat obfuscated by a couple of massive horror games released just a few months prior: Resident Evil 4’s remake in March 2023, and Diablo IV in June 2023. Thanks primarily to Diablo IV, June 2023 saw the highest horror game viewership over this period of 221.5M hours watched.
Looking at horror game viewership compared to total live-streaming viewership reveals there is still plenty of room to grow. In fact, on average, horror games account for just 3.1% of monthly viewership across all live-streaming platforms. Even with the Halloween boost, October 2024 horror game viewership accounted for just 4.7% of all live streaming viewership. This may change as technology develops however, creating more interactive ways for streamers and their fans to collaborate. The cheaper budget and enduring popularity of the horror genre (as seen in the film industry) make it a hotbed of innovation.
Horror game Twitch integration is a relatively nascent subgenre that uses mechanics unique to live streaming to connect streamers’ gameplay with audience input. Horror games with Twitch integration like Death Damnation and Gori: Cuddly Carnage create a terrifying experience in which viewers can torment (or, less likely, help) their favorite streamers. As this tech develops and big-name streamers try it out, there is no doubt this shared experience will become the default method for many creators to play horror games and engage their audience.
In the short term, however, there are still plenty of horror experiences to look forward to. Phasmophobia is actually fully releasing later this year (yes, it’s been in early access this whole time!) and the body-hopping horror title Slitterhead releases in just a week’s time. Stream Hatchet will be watching to see how the horror hype sticks around long after Halloween has concluded.
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