Microsoft and EA helped Twitch's E3 live stream figures increase dramatically

Staff Writer

Phil Spencer giving the Xbox keynote

In case you had any doubt, video games are big business. The video game business is becoming so huge that Amazon forked out nearly $1 billion for video game streaming service Twitch last year. In a blog post, compared to last year, the company reports that their Twitch E3 figures almost doubled to more than 21 million viewers.

Twitch covered all the big name keynotes including Sony and Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft’s figures along with EA “attracted the most viewers at any single time”.  While Twitch didn’t offer any more specifics on any single event, it said overall concurrent viewership peaked at 840,000.

Streaming game footage is where much of the action is, and many companies know it. Google failed to outbid Amazon for Twitch and has since announced it’s own streaming service called YouTube Gaming. Dailymotion and Valve have entered the arena with GamingLive.tv and Play.tv respectively.

On the E3 show floor, a small number of fans mingled with industry pros and journalists. That all added up to about 52,000 people for the whole week.