Streamlabs: Twitch accounted for 82.3% of Q3 total hours streamed, followed by YouTube Gaming at 5.6% and Steam at 4.6%; Kick grew ~204% from Q2 2023 to Q3 2024
For years, the Logitech-owned creator dashboard Streamlabs and its data partner Stream Hatchet have compiled quarterly progress reports for the streaming industry.
Context & Ripple Effects
Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet extend a long-running record of platform comparisons: an earlier Streamlabs report put Twitch at roughly 91% of the market in its measurement, even as YouTube Gaming was already a meaningful secondary outlet in the 2020 Streamlabs comparison.
The important qualification is that this report ranks hours streamed, not necessarily audience watch time. That distinction matters as later cross-platform viewing data placed YouTube ahead in watch hours in a broader 2025 livestreaming ranking, showing that creator supply and viewer demand need not concentrate in the same places.
First-order effects
- Twitch remains the overwhelmingly dominant venue for the streaming activity counted by Streamlabs, while YouTube Gaming and Steam occupy much smaller shares of that creator output.
- Kick’s reported growth from Q2 2023 to Q3 2024 makes it a faster-growing challenger from a low comparative base, increasing its relevance to creators evaluating where to broadcast.
Second-order effects
- A large Twitch lead gives creators and streaming-tool providers a strong reason to preserve Twitch-first workflows, while smaller platforms must compete harder for broadcaster attention and content supply.
- The gap between streamed-hours rankings and later watch-hours rankings raises the value of platform-specific measurement: advertisers, creators, and tools cannot safely treat one engagement metric as a proxy for another.
Third-order effects
- If challengers continue adding creator supply without matching Twitch’s concentration, livestreaming may become more multi-homed at the creator level while remaining concentrated in the primary distribution venue.
- The sector’s competitive story will increasingly turn on which metric is being measured—broadcast output, watch time, or creator growth—rather than on a single universal market-share ranking.
The trend: Livestreaming competition is shifting from a simple Twitch-versus-rivals narrative toward fragmented platform roles, with creator supply, audience viewing, and growth moving at different rates.