In last week’s edition of Monday Morning Marth, I talked about major attendance and why 2024 could end up being the best year for major attendance since 2017. Most people tend to like positivity and hope over negativity and doom, so this ended up being a pretty popular column. Keeping this in mind, however, attendance, as important as it is, remains one factor for community health. The other one is viewership.
Longtime readers of this column will know that I love talking about viewership. Recent ones will know that 2024 has not been a great year for Melee in terms of people watching the game. Now, you might be wondering why this matters; what you need to know is that the more viewers big tournaments get, the more likely they are to secure advertising or stream sponsorships that bring significant amounts of revenue to their event. The more money that tournaments make, the more likely that they are to return and withstand our community’s penchant for brain drain.
For this column, I’ll be examining what Twitch viewership has looked like in the first half of 2024, while comparing it to previous years in recorded history, using Sullygnome’s estimated watch time hours as my point of reference. After that, I will showcase what the second half of each of those years looked like, use this knowledge to predict what the second half of 2024 could look like, and then make my predictions for the state of viewership by the end of the year. I’ll then try to offer some proactive suggestions and takeaways based on the current climate.
What Have the First Halves of Each Year Looked Like For Viewership?
Before I get into the numbers for Twitch viewership in the first half of each year, I do want to acknowledge a few important factors in my methodology. First off, these are projected estimates based on a third-party resource, not necessarily the exact numbers. The numbers are also entirely attributed to Melee as a categorized game on Twitch, not necessarily all Smash games. As a result, when I talk about what’s good for Melee, it may not be good for all of Smash and it may not even be relevant for a particular tournament’s goal. The last thing to note is that unlike last week, in which I used SSBMRank periods to split attendance, I’m just using calendar years.
To address the obvious – yes, Melee has seen a fairly significant decline in viewership over the last eight years, particularly in the first half of the year. Oddly enough, 2021 and 2022 were brief resurgences and glimmers of hope. At the same time, and in line with what I mentioned in the last column, most year’s second halves tend to be more stacked than how they begin. Is it possible that our second half viewership has gotten better in recent times?
What have the second halves of each SSBMRank year looked like?
While there are some years where viewership really takes off in the back end of the year, like 2020, 2021, and 2022, there are also some, like 2017, 2019, and 2023, where viewership doesn’t step up at all in the second half of the year. I would not say this is enough to significantly deter from the fact that Twitch viewership has seen a significant decline over the last eight years. That part isn’t in dispute. The question though is if 2024 can stem the bleeding.
What Could 2024 Look Like?
Taking a closer peek at the shifts in viewership from one half of the year to the next, I created five different outcomes for 2024 viewership. Readers of my previous column will recognize this way of looking at it as basically examining everything from the worst likely scenario to the best one within the realm of possibility.
In the bottom scenario, our summer viewership completely tanks, all the top players suddenly start holding the scene hostage as they refuse to stream events without absurdly lopsided ad revenue split deals, and maybe Hungrybox and Mang0 retire for good. In the top scenario, we have our best viewership season since 2022 – not impossible, yet not likely – with top players attending a bunch of tournaments, streaming them, and maybe Zain becoming a Hungrybox-level streamer for both Ultimate and Melee. Perhaps the Eggdog Invitational (or the Nouns Invitational, or additional tournaments) collectively earn the same community buy-in and spectatorship draw as Smash Summit tournaments. The middle three scenarios, all things considered, feel a bit more likely, with viewership hovering around the same level it was in the first half of the year, give or take 500,000 hours. Assuming the median outcome holds, here’s what 2024 would look like, with respect to other years.
Melee’s viewership decline is far more tragic than you might think. At the start of the 2020s, we were creeping up to Evo-era levels of spectatorship. It only came crashing down right after Nintendo fucked everything up. You can’t possibly look at the truth and not feel tremendously bitter. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s hopeless. While it appears that we’ve lost just under half of our viewership in the last two years, there are ways that the scene is currently overcoming Melee’s hurdles.
The first one is a temporary band-aid that some events, like Tipped Off, are already pursuing in the use of top player channels to stream matches. In a sense, I’m skeptical of this as a long-term solution – because it arguably entrenches a lopsided star player/tournament dynamic where majors outside of Genesis and The Big House basically have to kowtow to the demands of top players even if it makes their event worse. However, it also makes sense for tournament numbers considering the greater popularity of top streamers to available alternatives, such as regional volunteers. While this runs the risk of some of these players discovering their inner robber baron and holding tournaments hostage,it could also work out well. According to Mango on the latest On a Tuesday podcast, he gave 100 percent of Tipped Off’s ad revenue to Ohan, the organizer behind Tipped Off. I don’t have the exact numbers, so I can’t technically verify the exact number, but my educated guess is that this would be at least thousands of dollars.
The second one is the creation of local circuits or “leagues” to maintain viewership intrigue during the weekdays. While the greatest success case of this happens to be Star League, which is tied in with Mang0’s brand, as well as my dear friend Aiden Calvin’s, I absolutely love the idea of small-scale structure in larger regions to maintain small, steady viewership. For regions with money, top players, and venues, there is no reason to not experiment. It’s been an absolute joy to watch Star League, to become more in tune with the players and personalities of SoCal, as well as see top talent representation. I wish the East Coast had a version of this; like if we could suddenly see the Eldritchian Bowser God Loadspiller go to New York City and work his way up from D2 to D1, taking on the region’s best players, one by one. I know weekday streams provide only a small fraction of watch time hours, but it’s still important to retain enough regular Melee viewers to retain enough interest in the game to build up to our bigger money-maker tournaments.
Now, when I say talent, I know I just brought up a player, but I’m not only talking about competitors here. This brings me to my third suggestion and method of drawing viewership that I believe tournament organizers are starting to be aware of: the value of having a great commentator around. For certain events, it may actually be more worth it for your viewership to have a notable commentator – not just top echelon – present than a Top 25 player. This is going to make the heads of some of my readers explode, but hear me out.
Personalities are often the largest connecting thread that most people have to Melee. Most people watch top eights or events because they’re directly connected to their favorite players or personalities in the scene. All due respect to the players just below the Top 10 level, there’s a large chance that they are not more valuable than their rough equivalents as commentators. Objectively speaking, turndownforwalt has more than 85,000 subscribers on YouTube. There are several people who watch Melee who would recognize Aiden as a personality (even if he’s not a commentator) before they’d recognize your median player in Top 32 of a major. Is it really that crazy to think a top commentator might be better for viewers than a top player?
On one hand, maybe I’m delusional. On the other hand, both the Crimson Blur and Vish were present at Eggdog Scramble 2, casting its top eight despite there being no major contenders present. We have a large contingent of amazing, recognizable personalities in our commentator base, from charming game show hosts to meme-king personalities and generational greats. Obviously each event’s wants, needs, and resources are different, but for the ones who can afford it, I believe it would be wise to tap into this talent pool. Honestly, I think any sponsors that have the cash, right now, should start flying out casters.
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