Asmongold fuels Final Fantasy XIV’s Twitch Revival

Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV back in 2010 on PC and PlayStation 3. The original version of the game was considered a straight-up failure. In fact, players and critics gave it such poor reviews that the game's creator was forced to send an apology letter to fans. Fast forward to July of 2021. Popular Twitch streamer Asmongold has been almost exclusively playing World of Warcraft for years - with a brief stint in New World. At this point, he's becoming fed up with the lack of new content from the game's developers and is looking for something new. So, he caves to peer pressure (in addition to unrelenting fan requests) and finally tries out Final Fantasy XIV.

Asmongold's first FFXIV stream on July 3rd peaked at around 150,000 viewers. Suffice it to say, his first impressions were positive, and his fans took notice. The impact of his fans wanting to download the game was so impactful that they crashed one of the game's servers the same day. Streams Charts, a website that analyzes streaming data, recently released the numbers from the recent influx in FFXIV streams. The increase in streamers playing the game went up 63% while viewers watched 24.7 million hours of FFXIV content on Twitch. Yes, this was largely due to Asmongold's popularity on the platform. However, the data shows that the number of FFXIV streams went from 22,000 to 36,000 in the four weeks since he began playing the game.

Furthermore, the game has since broken its concurrent player count records on Steam. Its previous record was 47,000 players. Now, it sits above 58,000. Of course, that's without players on PS4, PS5, or through Square Enix's own client directly, which don't release stats like this.

This influx of new players has even led Square Enix to apologize for the long queue times across the whole game, especially on the Aether Data Center, which is where Azmongold began playing. It's now been classified as "congested" meaning new characters can't be created on that server.

According to Streams Charts, FFXIV averaged 540 creators who streamed the game regularly. After Asmongold joined the fray, that number jumped up 41% to 762 streamers. The Asmongold effect was real.

Despite the increase in creators streaming the game, Asmongold still maintained the vast majority of views. Following his first broadcast, the game saw 6.7 million hours watched. Over half of those viewers belonged to Asmongold himself. Throughout the four weeks of Streams Charts' data, the streamer scored 8.5 million hours watched. Other popular streamers that have contributed to FFXIV's recent popularity include summit1g and richwcampbell.