In lockdown, people tuned in to Twitch just to watch other people talk

Twitch may have started off as a platform for vicariously consumed spectacle—for watching other people shoot zombies or race cars as they played video games. When the pandemic locked people down in their homes last year, viewership doubled. But mostly, users were logging on for the far less dramatic sight of watching people sit in front of their webcams and talk.

New data from Stream Hatchet, which provides game-streaming analytics, shows that Twitch users spent a collective 6.3 billion hours on the platform in the first quarter of 2021, an all-time high. Within Twitch, the category called “Just Chatting“—the plainest possible description of its contents—accounted for 12% of all viewed videos.

In the third quarter of 2020, the category had become the most-watched on Twitch: 522 million hours of “Just Chatting” videos viewed. In the first quarter of 2021, that number ballooned further still, to 754 million hours.

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