Twitch’s E3 livestreams watched by a staggering 925K concurrent viewers

Microsoft, Sony, Ubisoft, and Nintendo all still need to kick off their presentations and announcements for the massive Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in Los Angeles, but plenty of people have already tuned into the event and its surrounding happenings.

Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, said that 925,000 people tuned in simultaneously to the scores of livestream channels broadcasting content from E3 on Sunday. That’s up from 840,000 on the Sunday of last year’s E3. And this is even before the show starts — all of this was from publishers EA’s and Bethesda’s lead-in events. That growth for concurrent viewership shows that more and more people are learning about games by watching content on Twitch from their favorite personalities.

And its those personalities that help drive Twitch’s massive viewer numbers. Last week, the streaming company said that its 100 million viewers watched 800 million hours of esports, competitive gaming events, over the last 10 months.

Other websites, including YouTube, are also streaming content from E3, but Twitch’s traffic is outpacing that competition. While Google’s video site has a distinct advantage when it comes to recorded on-demand video related to games, Twitch is the leader in live content, and the huge gaming community knows that. For an event like E3, where fans of the hobby want immediate updates and news from every one of the biggest companies in the space, people naturally tune their browsers to Twitch.tv.

Sunday’s broadcasts included a pair of media briefings. Madden NFL and Battlefield 1 publisher Electronic Arts kicked off the event with its EA Play livestream in the afternoon before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim publisher Bethesda held its own conference in the evening.