Is the chess (Twitch) boom over?
Some days ago IM Rozman tweeted about the decline of the chess boom.
I have taken a look at the Twitch chess data1 and the monthly games played on Lichess since the chess Twitch peak that happened in February 2021.
As you can see the average concurrent viewers is down from 33000 in February 2021 to 8000 in April 2022 ~ 76 % lower. This is while the number of games on Lichess is down only 2% in the same period.
It seems people keep playing chess, but have moved away from watching streamers play chess. The number of average concurrent chess streams is also dropping.
The easing of the covid restrictions worldwide might also play into these changes. If we look at the number of viewers that the streamers are competing over we can see that at the peak in February 2021, there were 212 viewers per streamer, while we are down to 119 per streamer now.
Even after the decline chess is still the top 18 game overall to stream based on the viewer/streamer ratio according to twitchtracker.com.
What do you make of these changes? Join the discussion below.
Read part II:
/Martin
Great chess newsletter, both to you and to Nate
Cool analysis and graphs! Maybe you could acknowledge that you have no data on chess.com - the site that is heavily featured on Twitch streams. Hard to generalize such as "people keep playing chess" when one big part of the picture is missing...