Twitch is the most popular online broadcasting service in the world. That is why the best way to analyse trends of streaming is to research Twitch itself. Let’s see what surprises the last month of 2017 hid from us.

The most popular games, all-people favorites — League of Legends and PlayerUnknown's Battleground do not lose their positions. However, the drama immediately begins after them.

Dota 2 continues to lose viewers. The Dota 2 Circuit system guarantees a huge amount of tournaments throughout the year, but this decision didn’t popularize the game greatly among the people. We could observe Dota 2 Summit and the Major tournament DreamLeague Season 8 in December — this was not enough. The same can be said about the second game from Valve — Counter Strike: Global Offensive. The presence of PUBG and Fornite strongly hits the positions of the team shooter — the game do not endure competitions and the developers do not try to change the situation.

The original third-person shooter from Epic Games — Fortnite, continues to gain momentum. A few months ago the average number of this game’s online viewers did not exceed 10,000 people, but now their amount quadrupled. We can observe how Fornite from background project turns into the flagship of the Epic Game. The decision to release the Battle Royal mode and distribute it with free-to-play format turned out to be correct.

Games like Fifa 18, Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto V have never had a giant audience on Twitch, but they remain consistently in the top of the most popular broadcasts. Developers of these games all the time make new content and have a close contact with the community, thus players are quite loyal.

Path of Exile is one of the most popular ARPG nowadays. Game had a huge update in December — War for the Atlas. That is why PoE broke into the top of the most popular online broadcasts. Eventually, the audience will gradually lose interest, but it’s unclear how fast.

They Are Billions and Lethal League are new games which appeared in December. Lethal League is a fighting and it lost its position very quickly. In the same time the strategy They Are Billions was good enough to find a stable audience and high-quality streamers. Next month we expect an impressive statistical results from this game.

RuneScape is very popular nowadays despite that the game is already 17 years old. Free-to-play model of distribution is one of the most important reason of RuneScape’s popularity. Developers are going to release a mobile version of their game — it will make RuneScape even more popular.

The main specialization of Twitch is gaming, but streamers have a possibility to make whatever content they want. There was an excellent opportunity for streaming in IRL or Talk Shows format in December — many fans were happy to celebrate Christmas and New Year together with their favorite streamers. Twitch also made a new section — Board Games. It should be done long time ago, considering that people were streaming board games in the Talk Shows section.