This year’s most popular shooting game on the Twitch streaming service is expected to be “Valorant.” In fact, the first-person shooter from Riot Games is expected to easily surpass Counter-Strike: Global Offensive from Valve, the second-most popular shooting game on the system. The Game Awards 2022 also recognised VALORANT as the year’s top esports title. The Riot FPS Game triumphed over the other four finalists on a night that featured numerous award-winning video games, athletes, and coaches.
Valorant had 1,197,406 peak views, making it the most-watched first-person shooter on Twitch in 2023, according to Sullygnome. Valorant streams an average of +4,000 channels, drawing people from all over the world. To watch the game throughout 2022, fans tuned in to Riot’s official channel and broadcasters, defeating competitors like Apex Legends, Elden Ring, Fortnite, and more.
The category on Twitch with the most viewers was Just Chatting, followed by Escape from taRkov, and GTA V. But when it comes to video games, Riot’s League of Legends takes the top, followed by Grand Theft Auto V. It’s safe to say Riot Games had a successful year in 2022.
Data from Stream Charts also showed that viewers of “Valorant” watched whopping 1.126 billion hours of content overall between January and December 18, 2022, according to reports. This number is almost twice as high as that of “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” created by Valve, the second-most watched shooting game on Twitch. For comparison, over the same time span, “CS: GO” had nearly 685 million total viewer hours.
Since 2012, especially in esports, Valve’s game has dominated the shooter genre. Even though there aren’t many casual streamers, there are a lot of CSGO competitions that attract players from all over the world. But Valorant adopted a comparable strategy in 2022.
