When a viewer in Czechia wants to watch someone play, they have for years gone to Twitch. Data that Stream Hatchet and TikTok are preparing for the Gamescom 2026 trade fair suggest that this is no longer a given. According to a report that GamesBeat saw before its release, 17.4 billion hours of live streaming were watched on TikTok Live in the first half of 2026, more than on Twitch and Kick combined.
A number that does not fit the established map
That comparison has a catch. The overall figure covers all live streaming on TikTok Live, from cooking to music. Gaming content accounted for 1.62 billion hours of it. Between the first and second quarters of 2026, gaming viewership on TikTok Live rose by 7.6%. On the basis of these numbers, the report frames TikTok as the fastest-growing gaming platform.
TikTok's gaming hours are still a fraction of what Twitch streams. According to Stream Hatchet, Twitch logged 4.55 billion hours in the first quarter of 2026, which is 51.3% of measured gaming streaming. TikTok's gaming figure for the entire first half is smaller than a single quarter of Twitch. The two cannot be placed side by side directly, just as podcast plays cannot be added up across platforms, because TikTok Live does not fall within the established measurement of gaming streaming at all. The report describes one thing: alongside Twitch, a new channel has grown up where gaming audiences spend their time.
Twitch is losing ground, and new players are growing around it
The map is shifting even without TikTok. Twitch logged 19.2 billion hours in 2025, but its share of the market fell by 8.3 percentage points over the year, and the last quarter of 2025, with 4.4 billion hours, was the weakest since the start of 2020. Year on year, Twitch lost 13.68% of viewing in the first quarter of 2026.
Smaller platforms are taking over the space it has left. Kick logged 4.5 billion hours in 2025, a year-on-year rise of 131%, and in the first quarter of 2026 its viewing rose by a further 65% year on year. YouTube Gaming holds a quarter of the market with 2.22 billion hours per quarter. The whole live streaming market reached 36.4 billion hours in 2025. The gaming audience is splitting across more platforms, and TikTok Live is simply the latest destination to which part of it is moving.
For brands, one place to reach players is disappearing
For a brand director, who tops the hours ranking is not the point. What matters is that the one place where you could reach “the gamer” is ceasing to exist. Stream Hatchet makes exactly this point in a comment by director of product Alessandra Pinto. “Gaming audiences are becoming increasingly distributed across platforms. That changes how brands should think about audience strategy,” she says. “Instead of looking for where gamers are in general, marketers need to understand how their specific audience is distributed, which creators are influencing them, and where they can have the greatest impact.”
The practical consequence is a shift in the question. Instead of “where are the players”, a brand asks “where exactly is my audience, and which creators influence it”. TikTok Live thereby targets players at the very moment its European advertising business first turned a profit and is looking for more inventory to sell. The report comes out at Gamescom, Europe's largest gaming event. An audience that used to be measured by one number on one platform is now sorted by who actually watches it and who advises them on what to play.
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