Facebook Aims to Conquer Gaming

Facebook recently announced a dedicated gaming app aimed at capturing viewers from popular streaming platforms Twitch and YouTube, a move that shows Facebook is serious about quickly boosting their new gaming streaming platform.

Facebook has lagged behind streaming monsters Twitch and YouTube for years now, despite the company's enormous user base of over 2.5 billion. Still, Facebook Gaming saw an over 200 percent increase in hours viewed between 2018 and 2019. Microsoft’s new Mixer streaming platform saw a similar large increase of 149 percent over the same time period.

While the two new gaming platforms appear to be growing rapidly, Twitch and YouTube are still miles ahead of the competition in terms of total hours of viewership. The king, Twitch, had over 9.3 billion collective viewing hours between 2018 and 2019, while YouTube had a respectable 2.6 billion. The combined hours viewed for Facebook Gaming and Mixer barely scratched 700 million.

Facebook and Microsoft, however, do have a seemingly endless supply of resources at their disposal to slowly chip away at the streaming market share over the course of the next five years. Their cause is certainly justified, as the market for gaming and streaming is projected to increase significantly across the globe over that same time period.