Livestreaming has become a major part of the gaming community in the last few years, to the point where enthusiasts and outsiders are wondering just what kind of numbers all of the top platforms are doing. Stream enhancement platform Stream Elements and business intelligence platform Stream Hatchet teamed up for State of the Stream Q1 2019, breaking down the risers and fallers all across the board.
If you’re curious who rules the streaming world, it’s not Richard “Ninja” Bevins — not right now, at least. While the wildly popular streamer is the one of three to not have ever fallen out of the top five, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek has put together the strongest single-month performance, with over 15 million views in February. With Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar bringing in over 10 million in March, and Turner “Tfue” Tenney topping 10 million in January, these are the only streamers that have come close. Nick “NICKMERCS” Kolscheff, Herschel “Guy” Beahm IV (aka DrDisrespect), Tyler “loltyler1” Steinkamp, and Chance “sodapoppin” Morris are the other streamers that have made top-five appearances so far this year.
While Twitch hit a major milestone in early 2019, accruing 2.7 billion hours of views (almost 1 billion in January alone), the livestream platform can’t rest on its heels. YouTube has doubled its viewership from Q1 2018 to Q1 2019 and Mixer’s numbers quadrupled in that same time period, going from 22 million hours watched to 89 million.
Now you’re probably wondering, which games are powering these streams? If you’re itching to crown a new king, hold your horses. Despite a decline and some fresh competition, Epic Games’ Fortnite is still ruling the charts comfortably. Apex Legends came out strong and peaked at 40 million hours watched per week, which is an all-time high for a single game on Twitch. Top-20 streamers haven’t been playing Apex Legends as much, though, which has caused it to decline significantly. Only two of the top 20 played it in March. Fortnite dipped under 100 million hours watched for the first time in a long time in February, but bounced back with 118 million the following month.
In Q1 2019, the top stream games/categories in order are Fortnite, League of Legends, Apex Legends, IRL, and DOTA 2. The biggest increase came out of nowhere, with Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5 rising 178.02% from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019. The Stream Elements and Stream Hatchet report shows that top streamers Summit1G, sodapoppin, Saqib “LiRik” Zahid, Mitch (aka “Vader”), and Lucas “Buddha” set the trend for its rise.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.