Recently, a new game by the name of Valorant has taken over the streaming industry. It’s broken numerous records, like the peak viewership number for a single game that Fortnite has held since October 2019, from a 1.69 million record to an astonishing 1.72 million concurrent viewers on April 7th of 2020.

Ever since its debut on April 4th, it’s numbers have skyrocketed above that of any other game – however, it has been slowly declining ever since. As the graph shows, the peak of Valorant’s on April 7th has been decreasing over time, to a mere 184000 today (albeit still very impressive).

Usually, viewership of games tend to do that very same thing a lot – they’re hyped up at the start and gain a huge amount of viewers, but slowly decline as time goes on. Valorant doesn’t seem to be all that different.

However, Valorant’s still holding its fair share of viewers over a month after release. Usually, games die down extremely quickly – at least the ones that can’t seem to hold a fan base.

Other games, like the popular Animal Crossing: New Horizons, have died down in popularity in a similar fashion – we can see a huge spike to almost 250000 peak viewers on its release, and after just a month, the game has been stagnating at around 40000 viewers or so in the last couple of weeks.

But some games break this trend.

Ah yes, the ever popular Fortnite, released in 2017, completely shattered this trend of dying off slowly after just a month of play.

In fact, Fortnite didn’t even start off as strong as many other games. Because Fortnite wasn’t mainly a multiplayer game at its release, people really didn’t see that much value in the game. Only after the Battle Royale mode was released did its popularity begin to really grow.

Why is this?

Well, Epic Games, Fortnite’s producer, didn’t really hype the game all that much until its Battle Royale release. As a result, Fortnite was able to garner popularity over time, instead of all at once – something that probably made this game popular for the years to come.

And even other games, like the ever-popular League of Legends, have maintained their viewership numbers for years and years. League of Legends was released by the same company as Valorant, Riot Games, in 2010! Yet it still holds the second position in average viewership numbers as of writing this article, after 10 entire years of gameplay.

Games like League of Legends go into yet another category that many deem, or at least I do, as undying games. Other games like League include the ever-popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that was released in 2012 and Dota 2 released in 2013. Perhaps Minecraft, released in 2009, and Fortnite fit into this list now as well.

In general, the dream of a game developer is to make one of these undying games – it’s almost a one in a million shot in order to do so. But personally, I think it’s good that we don’t have too many of these; games passing and going is part of the cycle that needs to happen in order to make things fresh, new, and exciting for the players, and allow them to constantly adapt to the current conditions at hand.

-DZ