Stream Hatchet

❗ Your YouTube Gaming Report Is Here: 1-in-4 Hours of All Live Streaming Viewership❗ 2025 was a landmark year for @YouTube Gaming as it hit a record 8.8B hours watched (up 12% from 2024). Anyone interested in tapping into streaming communities MUST brush up on Google's role in the space. We've broken down every major trend, regional shift, and creator story that defined YouTube Gaming in 2025. The full report is live right now with: 🔶Regional powerhouses: Asian viewership dominated YouTube Gaming, with Japan leading at 451M hours watched in 2025 thanks largely to VTubers. 🔶 Creator kings: @ishowspeedsui led the entire platform with 68.5M hours watched (someone tell him he can finally chill out 🥹) 🔶 Sponsored streams: Renewed interest in creative marketing activations as #ad stream viewership hit 4.5M hours in Q4 2025 (the highest since 2020) Find out more on where YouTube Gaming is headed next in the full, FREE report right here ➡️ buff.ly/78XJbh1

@Stake @1xBet_Eng @Stokastic @DraftKings @FanDuel If you're curious how prediction markets also fit into this picture, or want to know more creators in the iGaming space, check out our full article here ➡️buff.ly/UyfmWhq

However, iGaming conversation is also thriving beyond Kick. Among YouTube channels with high mentions of iGaming brands, @Stokastic DFS leads with 742K hours watched thanks to chat around @DraftKings and @FanDuel lineup strategy. Their audience fulfills a niche and is deeply engaged - exactly the kind of betting-literate audience iGaming brands want to reach. Then there's @barstoolsports. Three distinct channels cluster in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th: Barstool Sports (88K hours watched, 1.9M followers), Barstool After Dark (87K), and Barstool Gambling (79K), each targeting a slightly different slice of the betting audience. A blueprint for how a media brand can own iGaming-adjacent viewership across multiple channels at once.

🎰 iGaming & Betting Brands: Who Hit the Jackpot in 2026? 🎲 Looking at global searches, the interest in iGaming has grown 8X from 2023 to 2026. That's thanks in no small part to synergy with live streaming: People love covering competitive content there, and that's a great match-up for iGaming fans. So we took a little peek at some iGaming stats from January of 2026 to see how iGaming was being represented on live-streaming platforms 👀

But @Hayama_Marin earned her top spot: She's a familiar face among the top channels for major survival horror debuts, having been a significant presence during both Silent Hill f and Resident Evil Requiem. Her support even for this relatively small title shows her passion for the genre 👻 Horror remakes have been one of live streaming's most reliable debut drivers for years now, and Fatal Frame 2 slots right into that tradition. We dove deep into the horror remake trend in our full breakdown ➡️ buff.ly/HCdGXGJ

@nijisanji_app VTuber 葉山舞鈴 (Hayama Marin) of Ohayama Ch. led all streamers with 68.2K hours watched, more than four times second place GAMEゆうな at 16.2K. Then came @SC_showcome at 15.1K and おついちTube and RJ的遊戲頻道 both at 12.3K 👻 Three big trends shine through here: Streamers from Asia, YouTube channels, and VTubers were super hyped for the return of Fatal Frame. For a title this deeply rooted in Japanese horror folklore, developed by a Japanese studio, and originally beloved by Japanese audiences back in 2003, that's no surprise at all 🗾

📸 Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake Has Arrived On Live Streaming 🦋 @TeamNINJAStudio and @koeitecmoeurope's remake of the 2003 PS2 survival horror classic launched last week, and those photogenic phantoms of Minakami Village were ready for the age of live streaming. The debut wasn't bad for a niche horror title making its return after more than two decades: 405K hours watched, 14.7K peak viewers, 2.4K average viewers across 1.5K unique channels. (@project_zero_kt)

Oh, and this is only 5 of the Kings League's active regions. France and @KingsLeagueMENA are yet to kick off their 2026 splits, so the Kings League kingdom is about to get a lot more crowded 👑 Curious how sports more broadly are performing on live streaming? Check out our full breakdown here➡️ buff.ly/G75KPe9

@KingsLeague @KingsLeague_BR @KingsLeague_IT Spain, where Kings League began back in 2022, sits third once the full field is playing, peaking at 83K in Week 2 and 58K in Week 3. And Germany, the newest arrival, debuted at 48K in Week 2 and but ticked upward to 52K in Week 3 👀

👑 @KingsLeague 2026 Kicks Off With 5 Regions Already In Play ⚽ Gerard Piqué and Ibai Llanos' seven-a-side football competition is back on the pitch, and the first three weekends of 2026 have scored goals around the globe 🌍 Brazil (@KingsLeague_BR) is far and away the most hyped region for Kings League 2026 with a massive 529K peak viewers over this last weekend 🚨 That's almost 4X the peak viewers of the next closest region.

🏷️ The Most Popular Twitch Tags: Twitch Drops Lead, But VTubers Rule The Heart 🩷 For the uninitiated: @Twitch tags are the labels streamers attach to their streams to help viewers find content they'll love. Track which ones pull the most hours watched, and you get a pretty telling picture of the Twitch content landscape in 2025. Turns out, there were a LOT more branded and sponsored activations ✨ The DropsEnabled tag sat at the very top with 1.77B hours watched, around 75% more than second place. Streams carrying this tag are running Twitch Drops campaigns, where game developers reward viewers with in-game loot just for watching. The Drops effect is global. Five other non-English variants of the DropsEnabled tag also cracked the Top 30, each pulling 174 - 195M hours watched individually. AND every Drops tag on this list saw a growth in hours watched of 0.5 - 1% from 2024🌍 BIG caveat here though: Drops tags are auto-applied to participating streams by Twitch itself. So which tags deliberately chosen by users performed best..? Viewed this way, VTuber leads with 1.01B hours watched - and remember this is on Twitch, not even on @YouTube Gaming where VTubers reign supreme! ADHD follows at 816M (primarily used by creators signalling fast-paced chaotic content, and only partially by neurodivergent streamers building their community), then Chill (685M) IRL (530M), and Anime (515M). There's a little wrinkle in this data though regarding language. Tags like VTuber, IRL, and Anime rank higher partly because non-English speakers use the same terms. Tags that need translating get split across multiple entries (like the Drops tag examples), so tags that cross language barriers naturally rank higher. Looking for a little more advice on how to interpret tag rankings, or maybe wanting to see the growth of tag popularity over time? Check out our full deep dive on Twitch Tags here ➡️ buff.ly/qJj9xxC

@NetEaseGames_EN @NewsBlackDesert @FF_XIV_EN @Wuthering_Waves We ventured deep into the dunes on this one: Sponsored streamer peaks, competitor crossover, and full chat data. Get a sip of the sweet oasis that is our full analysis of Where Winds Meet's Hexi Expansion right here ➡️ buff.ly/AZvoVmy

This new audience was also super engaged: A sentiment analysis of 100K sample chat messages over Hexi's debut weekend found chat running roughly 5X more positive than negative (17.8% vs. 3.7%) 💗 Viewers raved about the new story content and visuals ("oooh with that fire umbrella looks so cool"), but some critics criticism zeroed in on specific combat changes and quest systems. Even the mixed messages acknowledged the game's quality though; a strong signal from a community that's clearly invested in what the Jianghu do next.

🌬️ Where Winds Meet's Hexi Expansion Sweeps Onto Live Streaming 🏯 Wanderers are back on the road: On March 6, 2026, Everstone Studio and @NetEaseGames_EN dropped Where Winds Meet's first major expansion, The Hexi Expansion, which sent players on a dream pilgrimage back to the Tang Dynasty to hunt the Wandering Ark across the desert ☀️ The live-streaming response was swift: Though Where Winds Meet pulled just 86K hours watched in the three days pre-Hexi, the first 3 days of the Hexi Expansion saw hours watched surge to 699K (an 8X increase!) while peak viewership jumped to 60.4K.

Pokémon Pokopia currently holds an 89 on Metacritic, making it both the highest-rated game of 2026 so far and the highest-rated Pokémon game in the franchise's history ‼️There's serious love for this cozy crafter... maybe even enough to overtake @animalcrossing 🦝🚸 But this is nothing new: Cozy games have been quietly taking over live streaming, and Pokémon Pokopia is the latest example of that trend. We dove deep into which types of cozy games are coaxing us into their snuggly little nests in our full article ➡️ buff.ly/rSj5tCi

The one non-Japanese streamer in the top 5 is @KNekro: A Spanish-language streamer with serious Pokémon credentials. He's a key figure behind Movistar KOI's international competitive Pokémon team (who appeared at the 2024 Pokémon World Championships) and is considered one of the most prominent voices in the Spanish-speaking Pokémon-streaming world.

🩷🫠Pokémon Pokopia Builds a Home on Live Streaming 🫠🩷 As a life sim @Pokémon spin-off co-developed by @GAMEFREAK_info, Pokémon Pokopia puts players in the role of a Ditto transformed into a human, rebuilding a desolate post-apocalyptic version of the Kanto region by crafting, building, and befriending Pokémon along the way. Plenty of people transformed into Dittos and got to crafting 🏡 Across its debut week, Pokémon Pokopia pulled 16.4M hours watched, 97.9K average viewers, and a 292K peak viewership across 22.5K unique channels.