Half-Life: Alyx beat out major titles like Fortnite and League of Legends in concurrent Twitch viewers on the game’s launch day.
Half-Life: Alyx became one of gaming’s most watched titles on Twitch yesterday. With 300K peak concurrent viewers (according to SteamDB data) the game lead the day’s peak concurrent viewers over major games like the recently released Doom Eternal (26K peak), perennial titles like Fortnite (118K peak) and League of Legends (180K peak), and just about tied the latest battle royale craze, Call of Duty: Warzone (296K peak).
Of course, one could expect that the launch-day viewership of a major game would beat out titles which have been out for a while now, but the launch-day viewership for Half-Life: Alyx is an order of magnitude beyond what’s been seen for any other VR game to date. The huge number very likely speaks to the fact that there’s probably far more people who want to play the game compared to those who can play the game considering the notoriety of the Half-Life franchise compared to the relatively small VR install base.
As a campaign title, Half-Life: Alyx isn’t likely to see the such high ongoing viewership of the aforementioned streaming juggernauts, but we’ll be interested to see if its 300K concurrent viewer launch-day peak is as high as the game will reach, or it it’ll go even higher as we approach the first post-launch weekend (when viewership tends to be at its highest).
As far as players go, Half-Life: Alyx also crushed existed records for peak concurrent players among VR games on Steam.