With no E3 this year, platform holders and Ubisoft still generated massive viewership numbers on Twitch. In fact, “decentralized announcement events” that big companies had to run this year brought more viewers than E3 2019 did. This is according to Carter Rogers, Principal Analyst at SuperData.
Sony, for one, saw their June 11 PlayStation 5 reveal watched by 1.5 million people, while the recent Xbox E3 2019 briefing was watched by 0.9 viewers.
Likewise, Ubisoft saw viewership grow for its Ubisoft Forward 2020 stream to over 1 million people. This is up from 0.75 viewers that watched the company’s E3 2019 broadcast.
While AAA publishers are fine skipping E3, smaller publishers and developers still need major announcement events to generate coverage. In the meantime, Rogers suggests they should “form partnerships with platform holders and top publishers” to get exposure.
For example, the indie game Bugsnax from Young Horses generated buzz after its trailer debuted during the PlayStation 5 reveal.