The second annual Twitch Rivals Squid Craft Games wrapped up on March 5th, crowning English-speaking creator sapnap, a member of the Dream Team, as the winner of the $100K prize.
The event generated 19.4M hours watched across Twitch, a 33% increase over last year’s numbers.
What Are the Squid Craft Games?
The first ever Squid Craft Games was broadcast on Twitch in January of 2022. The Minecraft competition is based off of the viral Netflix show, Squid Games, where contestants compete in challenges to win a large sum of money. The Squid Craft Games takes that concept into Minecraft with mini competitions between popular Minecraft live streaming creators.
Last year, the competition was limited to Spanish-speaking creators, but this year saw the addition of about a dozen English-speaking live streamers like xQc, Amouranth, and Dream.
190 channels co-streamed the event this year, generating 19.4M hours watched, up 33% from last year. While peak viewership was 20% less than last year with 1.6M peak viewers (compared to 2.1M in 2022), the average viewership across the 5 days was slightly higher at 1.03M viewers (compared to 1.02M in 2022).
Top Streamers During Squid Craft Games
Auronplay was the clear winner in total viewership during the event, recording the highest viewership of any channel each day. He generated in total 3.7 million hours watched with a peak viewership of 361K viewers. Spanish-speaking creators made up the top 5, with Elspreen generating 1.86M hours watched, Rubius with 1.15M, roier with 900K, and ibai rounding out the top with 836K hours watched.
Despite auronplay’s high stats, the viewership of the 2023 event was much more spread out among creators than it was last year. Firstly, live streaming creator exolkas was able to get onto the top peak streams of 2022 with his live stream of the Squid Craft Games final match last year with 1.19M peak viewers. This year, the highest peak viewership for any one channel was shadoune666 with 690K viewers during the finals.
Squid Craft Games Viewership
While average viewership was relatively the same and hours watched was actually higher in 2023’s event, that means that viewers were more spread out among the creators instead of flocking to one specific channel.
Additionally, the top 5 creators only generated 44% of the total viewership of this year’s Squid Craft Games. 2022’s event saw two thirds of the total viewership concentrated in the top 5 live streaming channels.
Several things could have influenced this, including the addition of English-speaking creators to this year’s event. French and English made up over 14% of the total viewership hours in the 2023 Squid Craft Games event, whereas last year it was less than a half percent.
Having a wider variety of live streaming creators from many backgrounds can help boost an event’s total viewership and reach multiple audiences and demographics, including those from different countries. When planning an esports or creator-driven event when brand sponsorships are involved, it’s important to define the target audience and choose participants, games, and other factors that will reach that audience the best.
Additionally, last year’s event saw 125 co-streamers while 2023’s reached 190 channels. This boosted the overall reach of the event and spread out viewership among more creators.
This year’s event is Twitch’s biggest event so far in 2023, and is one of the largest creator-driven events as well, behind only the King’s League.
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