Stream Hatchet: Indie Games on Streaming Platforms
Co-op party games, horrors, survival games - games in those genres can get great coverage if you're indie.
Stream Hatchet excluded so-called Triple-I projects from the sample, where large teams (often with over 50 people) work on relatively small projects. For example, Black Myth: Wukong is excluded from the sample, even though some systems classify it as an indie game. Indie projects that later became major franchises (Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddy’s) are also excluded.
Indie games accounted for about 10.3% of total user watch time in Q1'25. This is significantly higher than 6 years ago.
However, it can’t be said that indie game watch hours have been growing recently. The peak was in Q2'23—14.6% of all watch time was for indie games. Since then, there’s been a decline.
If you look at the top 500 games by watch hours, a third of them are indie projects.
At the same time, only 9% of indie games on the market have more than 5 million hours on streaming platforms in their first 30 days. Among AAA games, it’s 33%. This is largely due to indie developers lacking serious marketing budgets.
Less than 1% of indie games managed to reach 30 million watch hours (or more) on streaming platforms in the first 30 days. Fall Guys (253 million), Phasmophobia (128 million), and Palworld (121 million) achieved this. Even so, they haven’t become permanent chart-toppers, they get pushed out by either AAA projects or new indie hits.
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The most popular indie projects on streaming platforms are represented by three genres: horror, survival, and cooperative party games.
Since 2019, two projects have more than 1 billion hours on streaming platforms—Rust and Among Us.
It’s worth noting that all games except RimWorld are multiplayer. Even RimWorld has multiplayer mods.
Moreover, most of the projects on the list offer cooperative multiplayer specifically.
The main streamers focusing on the indie market are caseoh_, eliasn97, Miko Ch. Indie developers should include them in their mailing lists.