Twitch released a blog post yesterday detailing the dynamics of streaming viewership and the types of communiities that exist within the world's largest streaming platform. The games are unsurprisingly dominated by the eSports heavy titles, but the visual maps highlight the interconnectivity of the various communities. Check inside for more.
The map above details the streaming communities of the various games on Twitch, which are dominated by the most popular titles in contemporary video gaming - Dota 2, League of Legends, World of Warfcraft, and CS:GO. Each circle is indicative of a specific streamer, with the size of each circle dependent upon the popularity of the stream. The lines connecting each circle to other circles signifies the amount of shared viewership between the streams - that is, how much viewers of a specific stream watch other streams they are linked to.
For example, the largest circle in the Dota 2 section belongs to BeyondTheSummit, which has been casting the most tournaments on Twitch for most of December. The size of the circle represents how BTS are the largest streamers of Dota 2 on Twitch, while the multiple lines between BTS and the rest of the Dota 2 channels suggest that BTS are also the most commonly visited stream for the Dota 2 community. The numerous lines coming out of BTS also suggest that as the most prominent stream and eSports broadcasters in Dota 2, watchers of eSports in general would head to them instead of individual streamers or other casting studios.
Interestingly, the separation of League of Legends from Dota 2 suggests that the communities are rather isolated from each other, symbolic of the rivalry between the MOBA-styled game communities. Another noteworthy cluster are the group of Blizzard games - Hearthstone, Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft grouped rather tightly together, suggesting that there is a lot of overlap amongst the Blizzard communities.
It should be noted that the map is based off streaming statistics occurring in December 2014, and is not representative of total streaming across Twitch in the past year or in its history. For a larger, in-depth focus of the individual communities, visit the Twitch Blog.
