ShaDope – Minecraft’s History on Twitch…

The history of minecraft on twitch is very interesting especially when you consider that it is 10 years old and to think that people are getting hundreds of thousands of viewers per stream when only a few years ago people struggle to get a few hundred just makes you wonder how or today i’m

Going to be telling you just that but first consider subscribing it’s free and you can always unsubscribe later anyway enjoy the video June 6 2011 twitch is officially launched in the form of public beta and only a month after that i was able to find on the way back machine the first ever evidence of minecraft on twitch as you can see it’s not the best screenshot ever but this was 2011

And i’m pretty sure this is what actually twitch looked like but again this is the oldest evidence that i could find of minecraft on twitch as you can see the minecraft category didn’t even have an image of the minecraft logo or anything and as you can see by the viewer counts

The game wasn’t very well known and this is probably because the game wasn’t even out yet so you might be wondering if the game wasn’t out how are these people able to play and stream on twitch well before minecraft officially released on the 18th of november in the same year

There were beta and alpha versions that people had access to this is why for example pewdiepie could make his first ever video of minecraft in 2010 but we can’t really see much from the screenshot as you can see nothing’s reloading so i went searching and i found the oldest vod of minecraft

On twitch that is still public now bear in mind there could be an older one but i looked for a long time and i couldn’t find anything older and it went a bit like this somebody found her and i found some iron too and the way i found this guy is by going

Onto the wayback machine where i found him streaming the game on the second day that minecraft officially came out which makes him extremely og making it the oldest vod of minecraft on twitch and of course over time minecraft as a game became more and more popular especially over the coming years after

The initial launch and due to this growth in popularity more and more people decided to play minecraft live on twitch at this time the only thing that people really streamed was some survival let’s plays maybe some pixelmon time to time but there wasn’t really anything that would bring in

Hundreds of thousands of viewers like we see these days so really they kind of just streamed for fun and to just connect with the community i’d be like what i’m planning to do on my twitch so shameless plug go follow me there but anyway basically the twitch streams

Were just simple fun streams that you just come on and chill with in the background and this obviously meant that there were more and more competition than ever before it went from a few people who had access to beta and alpha being able to stream to almost anyone and this new competition

Obviously meant that viewers were split between more streamers and obviously this is very normal when a category on twitch grows but what led to this massive growth the simple answer is youtube things like modding survival let’s plays role playing were very very popular on youtube and because youtube

Is such a powerful place to build a community more and more people got sucked into the minecraft space that the game itself grew and as a result more people came to twitch to watch the game live the rise of people like stampy dantdm skydos minecraft etc boosted everyone

That made minecraft content on the internet especially as this audience was very very young and this audience spent all day watching these minecraft videos or streams and i know this because i used to be one of those kids and i think most of us were but sadly this massive audience

Eventually faded away in 2016 and from 2016 to 2019 minecraft was dead It was one of those games that everyone hated on it had a horrible reputation online and this led to a massive decrease in viewership all over the internet but especially twitch and while minecraft viewers were leaving and the numbers were going down there was a different game that actually was gaining viewers

Extremely quick and this game was fortnite which was the first reason for minecraft’s downfall while people like stampy and dantdm were dropping in views people like ninja nikkei ferti and other fortnite streamers only went up and that’s definitely a massive reason why minecraft died in the first place

But as i said minecraft had a pretty bad reputation even before fortnite came around and i don’t really want to get into it much but let’s just say some youtubers were acting a bit sus with people a decade younger than them and also people naturally just got tired of the

Game and wanted to try something else like fortnite for example and you can definitely tell that a lot of youtubers just didn’t have fun making videos on minecraft at that time so they just had to switch otherwise they would probably just quit but it didn’t take long for people to

Get really good at fortnight and people started to get tired of fortnite they realized that minecraft didn’t have this massive skill gap between the good players and the casual players because after all you could do whatever you want and people started to get very nostalgic about minecraft especially on places like youtube and

Twitch and in the same way as minecraft got popular in the first place it got revived again but this time things were a bit different pewdiepie would start to make minecraft videos which again would create a lot of nostalgia and people would start watching minecraft content again slowly minecraft became the top

Game again overtaking fortnite and as a result minecraft started to see massive boosts in viewers in the minecraft category and minecraft became so big that even foreign youtubers and twitch streamers started to play minecraft and when this revival took place there were smps all over the place older youtubers coming back

And all of this would make minecraft the most popular game in the world again but let’s bring it back to twitch since that is what the video is about well yes youtube success is vital for success on twitch twitch streamers also brought a lot of new content to the table

And at first this came in the form of speedrunning speedrunning is a way to play minecraft or any game really with one objective beat the game as fast as possible people would start to get number one on the leaderboard of the official speedrun website and because of that those people that

Were on top of the leaderboard suddenly got a lot more viewers than they did before and this had a massive boost when dream came around with his minecraft speedrunning and minecraft manhunt people suddenly became really interested in speedrunning even got so big that tfu started speedrunning and even xqc

Arguably the biggest streamer on twitch and when xqc started streaming minecraft speedrunning it kind of became solidified in the minecraft twitch culture and that’s why people still speed run on twitch to this day and the same thing happened to between streamers in and high pixel streamers in general due to a massive

Audience coming from tick tock people like wally bear hannah bow shot suddenly also blew up on twitch and while all of this growth was amazing it didn’t even compare to the dream smp and there are many reasons why the dream smp became so successful bringing in hundreds of thousands of

Viewers for a stream where a teenager spends half an hour talking to some green guy in an obsidian box and let me go through all of those reasons number one tommy in it the youtube mastermind got everyone from his youtube videos where his biggest audience is to go to his twitch and that’s

Why he gets so many viewers on twitch i mean think about it where did you find tommy i personally found him on youtube the second reason why the dream smp gets so many views is because of the story and here’s why when there’s a story people feel engaged and they want to know

What happens next and because of this people don’t want to miss a single stream people genuinely got invested in the law and the storyline which by the way is very interesting and i’m not surprised that so many people are so invested in it and because of the massive growth that the dream smp

Received new streamers who are added to the dream smp started blowing up look at foolish g for example according to socialblade foolish had 20 000 subscribers before he joined the dream smp which is obviously quite a lot but when you consider that only a few months later he has nearly 400

000 you can see what i mean when i say insane growth as you might think that 400k on youtube is impressive but he has 1.1 million followers on twitch and he’s one of the fastest growing twitch streamers on the entire platform and of course we have to give credit to him

Because he has been streaming a lot so in no way am i saying that the fact that he joined the dream smp is the only reason why he’s successful but we can’t deny that the dream smp gave him a massive boost and that’s what i’m trying to prove that the dream smp

Is the biggest thing that has basically ever happened on minecraft twitch if not twitch in general and all of this leads us to present day with extremely high view accounts and hundreds of thousands of loyal fans to the twitch culture i mean i feel like pog is just a regular english word

But the question is will this last forever well next video i’m going to be discussing just that but for now this was the entire history of minecraft on twitch