On Any Given Night, More People Are Watching Twitch Than Most Cable Networks … And It’s All Thanks To ‘Fortnite’

Epic Games’ fantastical free-for-all Fortnite, which has amassed 125 million registered users since launching in July 2017, isn’t just the biggest video game in the world. It’s also the driving force behind the phenomenal growth over the last year of Amazon’s Twitch, a video platform that has seen its daily traffic grow 80 percent since since the massively popular game launched.

Twitch started in 2011 as a streaming outlet for video gamers to watch each other play games like Halo and Call of Duty. When Amazon announced its $1.1 billion acquisition of the service in August 2014, the platform reported that 55 million viewers spent an average of an hour and 45 minutes a day watching Twitch videos. At that time, Twitch’s traffic averaged 567,000 daily viewers — about the same as MTV and Comedy Central during peak prime-time viewing.

In the four years since becoming part of Amazon, Twitch’s daily traffic has roughly doubled to 1.1 million viewers, according to the metrics site Twitch Apps. Traffic grew gradually in 2015, 2016 and into 2017, and then it started to surge when Fortnite launched in July 2017. The audience has nearly tripled over the last four years to 144 million unique monthly users.

One sign of how Twitch and Fortnite have become two great tastes that taste great together is that Twitch’s biggest single day since launch — 1.4 million viewers on June 14, 2018 — was the day Fortnite launched its biggest update of the year. At one point in July 2018, according to the metrics site Twitch Tracker, Fortnite videos accounted for 53 percent of all streamers and 33 percent of all viewers on Twitch.

Video gaming is a hit-driven and still-growing business, and Twitch’s streaming and viewing has been driven by those hits and those users. League of Legends accounted for 40 percent of Twitch traffic at the beginning of 2017, had fallen to 25 percent by the time Fortnite launched in July 2017, and is now at roughly 11 percent of Twitch traffic. Still, on a platform that has nearly doubled in overall traffic over the last two years, League of Legends is actually bigger now on Twitch than this time a year ago.

For a generation growing up playing and watching World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto instead of playing and watching baseball, basketball and football, video games are sports. You play a little Fortnite, you pick up technique and ideas watching rock-star gamers play the game on Twitch, and then you go back to playing it yourself.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider and is a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.