Twitch users have streamed 2 billion hours of video-game play during the pandemic

If you’re constantly on Zoom calls lately, maybe it feels like you might as well record your life. Well, that’s what 5 million people have done with their gaming lives on the streaming platform Twitch. According to TwitchTracker, since the end of February, the Amazon-owned service broadcasted over 2 billion hours of folks playing video games. That is around 230,000 years of footage. If you went back in time that far, you would see our very distant cousins sheltered-in-place in caves.

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Since this time last year, average viewership on the service jumped from 1.1 million to 2.8 million users. Those people are watching anything from demon slaying to soccer to tropical island furnishing. Whatever the game, a typical stream offers not just an escape from reality, but the company of others.

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