I Got the Twitch Mount - Now What?

With only a few days left on the promotion, I was happy to finish accumulating my four Twitch watch hours of Star Wars: The Old Republic to earn the Orlean Voidstream mount. I know you can always just open a random channel in a new tab, mute it and simply let it run in the background if you don't actually feel like watching (and I did in fact do that for a WoW mount last week) but with SWTOR I wanted to try and engage with the whole process a bit more genuinely. So thanks to Intisar, OotiniCast and Swtorista for providing me with some things to watch. I wasn't paying attention 100% of the time but I was watching!

Now, leaving my biases against streaming aside for a moment, my first thought upon claiming my new speeder was: What's next? Surely to make it worth the effort of implementing Twitch drops, they have to do more of these? But what does "worth it" even mean in the context of Twitch drops? Some people seem to consider "Twitch views" for a game a very meaningful metric of public interest and success. So did this purple speeder do anything for SWTOR's Twitch views?

I figured there was probably a site with some public data for this and quickly came across TwitchTracker. I found the SWTOR page on the site and have to admit that I immediately found it extremely interesting. Where to even start? Apparently SWTOR's "rank" on Twitch is #405, which sounds very bad, but #405 out of what total number? [Edit: A day after I wrote the first draft of this post the game's rank already changed to #425, so these numbers are clearly quite volatile.] The site's overall ranking of games goes up to to #773, which would put SWTOR firmly in the bottom half, but then while trying to look up other MMOs for comparison I found that Star Trek Online for example was ranked #1,359, so they clearly have more games than that in their overall database.

Anyway, I think we can agree that SWTOR is not exactly a great hit on Twitch in general, but the more relevant question for me was how its numbers have changed over time. There's a neat graph at the top of the page that shows both average (or peak, you can choose) viewers ever since the start of 2017 (the green line) as well as the number of channels that streamed the game on any given day over the years (the blue line). You can go to the page yourself or click on the image below to enlarge my screenshot of the graph.

The first thing that stood out to me was that while average viewers have hovered around an unexciting 100-200 per day for a really long time, there is one massive peak where daily viewers shot up to more than 15k for one day. What happened in July 2021? Oh right, they announced the Legacy of the Sith expansion (thanks for reminding me, blog archive). That makes sense then! No, wait... why does the peak show on the 15th of July when the announcement stream happened at the start of the month? Oh, apparently popular streamers Shroud and Summit decided to play SWTOR for a few days at that point. Sorry, I guess having a big 10-year-anniversary expansion is not nearly as interesting as those two guys.

So what has the Orlean Voidstream done so far? September isn't really properly visible on the graph yet since we're only halfway through the month, but August nearly doubled the game's average viewers compared to July. Then again, doubling a number that's small to begin with is hardly an amazing feat. We'll see what the impact on September will be.

What about the blue line, the number of channels streaming SWTOR? Well, the first thing I noticed and found quite amusing is that you can see a small peak every year on May the 4th, as people go "it's Star Wars Day, let's play a Star Wars game today" (presumably). That aside, the number of streamers seems to draw a clearer picture of interest in the game over time. From 2017 to 2019 the number of channels that streamed the game hovered pretty consistently around twenty per day for example, until there's a bit of a spike at the end of October 2019 - the release of Onslaught - after which point the daily average goes up to about thirty, indicating that this expansion increased engagement with the game. But oh wait, something else happened at the end of 2019 and throughout 2020... alright, so I guess Covid lockdowns helped with maintaining interest here.

Next we see a spike of more than 70 channels streaming SWTOR at the end of July 2020. I think that one can probably be attributed to the game's Steam launch. For the next few months, 30-40 channels streamed the game per day, until activity reached its biggest peak on record so far, with over 75 channels streaming SWTOR in February 2022 - which was the launch of Legacy of the Sith of course. Unfortunately we all know how that went, and accordingly, activity saw a sharp drop-off over the next few months, until things stabilised somewhat again with what must've been the launch of 7.1. Since then, things have been pretty stable again and kind of similar to 2017 in terms of daily streams, except with numbers ever so slightly lower.

Looking at all this, I can agree that Twitch stats clearly do reflect the state of the game in some way, though I'm kind of surprised that the number of channels that stream it seems to be a better indicator than the number of views. I mean, did that huge spike caused by popular streamers picking up the game really do anything in the long term? At best it looks like views were ever so slightly up for about two months afterwards when compared to the months before the spike.

As for the streaming numbers, while those do seem to correlate with known trends within the game, I find it hard to imagine that the causation is more than one way, as in: obviously people stream SWTOR more when it's doing well and they're having fun. I'm not sure that streaming numbers going up or down a bit have much of an impact on the player base in turn though. I guess I should just be glad that the overall picture is fairly stable.

Anyway, did you make an effort to get the Twitch drop mount? If so, did it make you interact with Twitch differently than normal? If you streamed yourself, did you see it making a difference to your viewership?