Twitch still consistently doubles its pre-pandemic audience numbers, but it’s not quite as big as it was two years ago. (StreamElements/Rainmaker.GG Image)

Amazon’s livestreaming platform Twitch is still the uncontested leader in its field, with millions of hours watched so far in 2023, but it’s taken a distinct audience hit year-over-year following big growth driven by the pandemic.

Twitch, which announced layoffs Monday, is still the largest livestreaming platform in the world by a significant margin. But new data from StreamElements and Rainmaker.gg shows a drop in hours of content watched on the platform, with 1.784 billion hours watched in January, down from 2.059 billion in January 2022.

That decline mirrors a similar drop that StreamElements/Rainmaker reported at the end of 2022. It comes as Facebook Gaming is on a slow but steady rise.

Twitch’s overall issue is straightforward: it had nowhere to go but down. On any given month in the last year, it’s comfortably shattered its pre-pandemic audience records, but much of its meteoric growth in 2020 was simply because almost every other form of entertainment got shut down due to lockdown measures. Twitch has still managed to hold on to a significant amount of its expanded audience, but now it’s got to compete with real life.

March has marked a period of change for Twitch so far, with CEO Emmett Shear’s abrupt departure and the layoffs, part of 9,000 job cuts at Amazon. Shear was replaced by former president Dan Clancy.

Live play of video games still makes up the bulk of the programming by Twitch streamers, with games like Valorant, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Apex Legends seeing their audience numbers spike in February. The all-purpose video-log category Just Chatting was still comfortably No. 1, however, with a full 263 million hours watched.

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