Pokemon is now in its ninth generation of games. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet launched on Nov. 18, and both have performed exceptionally well, as expected. The game is also being taken in by the masses on Twitch, with the games doing incredibly on the streaming platform.
Scarlet and Violet both feature almost identical gameplay. As always in the pokemon series, only minor things differ between the two versions of the game. The biggest difference is the version-exclusive box cover legendary Pokemon.
Koraidon is Pokemon Scarlet’s Legendary Pokemon. Image via The Pokémon Company.
Scarlet has Koraidon, a fighting/dragon Pokemon. Violet has Miraidon, an electric/dragon Pokemon. These differences don’t matter when it comes to Twitch statistics. Both sets of numbers get counted together.
In the week following Scarlet and Violet’s release to the public, Pokemon became the second-biggest game on Twitch. The games raked in 315,000 peak viewership, according to Streams Charts.
Pokemon beat out GTA, Sports, Valorant, Overwatch 2, CS:GO and others in the week after its release. Image via Streams Charts.
The only game that outperformed the new Pokemon games was Call of Duty: Warzone. That’s probably only because Warzone 2 has only just been released, too. Pokemon also ranked below Just Chatting streams and Special Events, which include far too many variables to really provide a valuable contrast.
Nintendo’s new games managed to do better than established Twitch giants following release day. Valorant, Overwatch 2, CS:GO and Minecraft were all beaten handsomely.
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Grand Theft Auto V has a huge role-playing community, and it always does really well on Twitch. Pokemon even managed to beat that in the week of Nov. 17-23, even if it was just by a hair.
The second-biggest Pokemon release on Twitch ever
Coming in at 315,200 peak viewers, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have had the most successful streaming release of all of the mainline Pokemon games.
It had 130,000 more peak viewers than Generation VIII’s Sword and Shield. Generation VII’s Sun and Moon had just 33,704 viewers as its peak number when those games were given to the public in Aug. 2017.
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet’s peak viewership is nearly 130,000 more than Sword/Shield. Image via Streams Charts.
Scarlet and Violet have also been somewhat of a critical success. A Metacritic score of 74 is the lowest in main game history, but still amicable compared to other games released this year. Call of Duty has been one of the biggest releases of the year, and that only boasts a 79 critical review average score.
The biggest concern for Nintendo will be retaining the viewership with regular players finding the game incredibly buggy. The user score for the game is currently just 3.4/10. Performance issues and bugs are the biggest criticisms from the fanbase in the first weeks of the game’s life.
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet had more hours watched in opening week than any other Pokemon game. Image via Streams Charts.
The only Pokemon game to beat Scarlet and Violet in terms of peak viewership upon release is Legends: Arceus. That was a remaster of an already-made Pokemon game, meaning that it brought up a huge amount of nostalgia.
How has Pokemon streaming grown so much?
The biggest reason for the rise in Pokemon streaming is absolutely the introduction of the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is far easier to stream from and far more accessible in terms of streaming than the Nintendo DS systems ever were.
It’s now far easier to share screen captures on the Switch when you can plug it into monitors and load it up on the big screen.
The highest-viewed channels for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet in the week after its release. Image via Streams Charts.
This emergence of streaming for Pokemon has also allowed many different Pokemon streamers to fully develop their online personas and personalities. The content creators drive the traffic to viewers and that’s shown in the steady rise of Pokemon games on Twitch.
Japanese variety streamer Kato Junichi, for example, was the most popular streamer to broadcast it, and his viewers watched him play the game for 856,000 hours.
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