The 5 Most Popular Games on Twitch in 2021

Free-to-play MOBA from Riot Games has not left the tops of Twitch for many years and consistently occupies an honorable first place among all the games that are broadcast on the platform. It's not surprising: LoL, unlike many other multi-player long-term projects, is constantly evolving, not letting players get bored in the usual surroundings. In addition, interest in the game is actively fueled by championships that are consistently held around the world. And, let's be honest, they look much more spectacular than international Dota 2 tournaments, although in terms of the general mechanics of the game, plus or minus, they are similar. It is unlikely that anyone will be able to push LoL from the first place in the coming years.

The best-selling game in the Rockstar Games portfolio also does not lose relevance even eight years after its release. Its popularity on Twitch in 2021 grew in arithmetic progression, then fell by half (and at the same time the game still remained on the second line of the rating!). Where does the interest of players and spectators come from? Rockstar Games has been polishing the golden formula of its GTA for many years — and by the fifth part it has brought it to such a shine that everyone will most likely continue to sit in GTA V until the "six" comes out, no matter how many years it takes, because no clone is still able to compete with it. For 24 years of its existence, the GTA series has acquired the status of a cult and in some ways even a therapeutic game, which you turn to at times when everyone around you is infuriating and you want a little destruction. After all, where else can you fix lawlessness so cheerfully and with impunity? And specifically on Twitch, the "five" is held largely thanks to the GTA Online multiplayer mode — an ultimatum network sandbox where you can explore the world, swing, rob casinos, collect cool cars and just do nonsense in the company of other players almost endlessly.

It's funny that Valve's projects are coming one after another in the Twitch top: the studio clearly knows the recipe for how to succeed in the gaming industry. And one of its components is fan mods. After all, Dota 2 is a continuation of the DotA modification map for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. The rest of the Dota 2 success story also largely follows the path of CS:GO. Immediately after the release in 2011, Valve organized The International, the largest esports tournament, which almost everyone has heard about these days, even Russian viewers of the program "What? Where? When?" (Boris Belozerov, the captain of one of the club's teams, was invited as a caster to the 2021 event). Stable excitement around the game is supported not only by its long and full of memes history, but also by Valve's monetization model: constantly coming out new items, skins and the user market. And The International itself regularly fuels interest in Dota: even casual viewers who do not understand half of the game terminology flock to the final broadcasts of the tournament every year. And it's still interesting to watch!

One of the last parts of the Counter-Strike shooter series, released in 2012, looks at the Twitch tops at the same time as appropriate and striking. The first part of CS was originally conceived as a custom modification to Half-Life and was released back in November 2000. A multiplayer first-person shooter about the confrontation between terrorists and special forces, which was released by Valve as an independent product, quickly became one of the most popular games around the world. And he acted as an older brother for subsequent projects, many of which literally copied the CS series— for example, the Korean Point Blank. That is why the constancy of the popularity of CS:GO is so amazing. Over the years of the series' existence, hundreds of multiplayer shooters have appeared, tailored according to similar patterns, but it is the original that still holds the attention of gamers around the world.

The first-person shooter in the genre of "battle royale" quickly burst into the world tops immediately after its release in 2019 — and since then has not left the top ten leaders of "Twitch" for a minute, consistently staying somewhere in the middle of the list. This is a solid achievement, especially considering what legends of the gaming industry the newcomer had to compete with. Apex Legends is a hero-shooter that resembles a hybrid of Overwatch and Titanfall, adjusted for the conditions of battle royale. One map, 60 players united in small teams of three, and a simple task to kill all the other opponents — that's the whole mechanics of the game. Apex is distinguished from PUBG and many other "royal battles" not only by the ability to choose a character with his unique abilities before the start of the battle, but also by the wild dynamics of battles and the verticality of gameplay. It is difficult to judge how long Apex will last in the top. The game is definitely different from other titles in the stated genres, and may even outlive some of the "oldies" of the rating.