No Man Sky scores biggest Twitch numbers since launch
The new NEXT update may have won back fans
No Man Sky's has generated 4.3 million hours of watched streams across Twitch and YouTube Gaming, Newzoo reports.
It's the biggest month recorded for the game since it launched in 2016, when it scored 7.8 million hours over the initial 30 days.
The spike has been caused by the game's new NEXT update, which has gone down warmly with fans and critics. No Man Sky was the No.24 game on Twitch for July, which might not sound impressive, but it is because almost all of those hours were generated in the last week of July after the update arrived.
It shows the impact the game's new update has had. No Man's Sky now boasts 54,810 concurrent players on Steam, which admittedly is a steep drop from the 212,620 it scored during launch, but an impressive turnaround for a game that suffered a consumer backlash when it launched.
Compared to previous updates, the improvement is notable. No Man's Sky generated 183,000 hours of Twitch viewership in the 30 days of the Foundation update in November 2016, with the Pathfinder and Atlus Rises updates scoring similar upticks.
Another game that has staged a bit of a comeback is Warfare by Digital Extremes. Despite a challenging 2013 launch, the game is now one of the strongest performers on Steam's player count list. The game was streamed for 4.7 million hours on Twitch in June 2018, a significant rise on the 388,000 hours it achieved during the same month in 2017. Digital Extremes has been experimenting with Twitch Drops for Warfare, which awards viewers with in-game items for watching streams.
Elsewhere, the most viewed esports title is League of Legends 21.9 million hours watched on Twitch, and 12 million watched on YouTube Gaming.
Interestingly, Age of Empires has appeared on YouTube Gaming's esports ranking at No.4. The game has an active esports scene in Vietnam and China.