Esports live-streaming surges in latest Stream Hatchet report

Stream Hatchet has released its Live-Streaming Trends Report for Q2 2025, revealing a 6% esports viewership increase across streaming platforms.

Despite 37% fewer tournaments, esports recorded 729m hours watched compared to 687m in Q2 2024.

Esports viewership across all major streaming platforms reached the highest Q2 figure since 2023 and the second highest overall.

Among the 404 esports tournaments held throughout the quarter (637 in Q2 2024), the BLAST.tv Austin Major, LCK Rounds 1-2 and MPL Indonesia Season 15 take the lead in terms of viewership.

These three events alone comprised 35% the total hours watched, making the competitions a major driver for esports viewership in the quarter.

With 92m, 87m and 75m hours watched, respectively, these events have also entered the top 10 most-watched esports tournaments since 2019 by that metric. This list is currently led by the League of Legends World Championship 2021, which recorded 169m watch hours, followed by five other Worlds editions.

Co-streaming appears to be another major driver of esports viewership, which Stream Hatchet already noted in its 2024 report. However, in Q1 of 2025, co-streaming figures surpassed official esports broadcast viewership for the first time.

The likes of ohnePixel (Counter-Strike), Caedrel (League of Legends) and Tarik (VALORANT) continue to be prominent figures in the space. Moreover, the number of co-streaming channels with more than 50,000 peak viewers was 35% higher than in the previous year (50 channels versus 37).

Meanwhile, the number of official esports channels reaching that same milestone dropped by 17% (76 versus 63).

The channel with the highest co-streaming audience in Q2 of 2025 was ohnePixel. The Counter-Strike streamer attracted 298,000 concurrent viewers during Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) 2025 Dallas.

Outside of just esports, overall live-streaming grew by 5% compared to last year’s Q2.

However, Twitch suffered its 4th successive decline in Q2 hours watched. While the streaming veteran’s market share dropped by 4.6%, competitor Kick gained 5.5% of the market.

While Kick is steadily moving towards the 1bn quarterly watch hour mark, Twitch remains the market leader, with 4.9bn hours watched and a 54.2% market share. In second place is YouTube Gaming, with 2.2bn watch hours and 24.3% market share.

The most-watched game of the quarter was Grand Theft Auto V (515m), followed by League of Legends (447m), Counter-Strike (369m) and VALORANT (263m). All other games could not reach the 200m watch hour mark.

Despite the popularity of first-person shooters, non-gaming streaming categories dominated in Q2. Mainly driven by the rise of Kick, non-gaming grew by 28% to garner 1.59bn hours watched. Noteworthy is also the 23% viewership decline of the Battle Royal category and the 28% surge of MMORPGs.

The most popular individual streamer of the quarter was zackrawrr (28.6m hours watched), who chose to simulcast his Twitch streams on Kick in June. In terms of female streamers, Emiru takes the lead with 7.5m hours watched.