Stream Hatchet

👥 How To Form Creator Communities That Are Practical, Unbiased, and Global 🌍 You might have seen we launched our Creator Communities feature last week, and we wanted to tell you a little bit more about this all-in-one creator marketing tool: 🔶Harness Over a Decade's Worth of Creator Data: We’re talking about 55M+ creators across 200M+ unique social profiles on 32 platforms worldwide. WORLDWIDE! While other creator marketing tools tunnel vision on Western markets alone, we cover the entire globe from LATAM to APAC and everywhere in-between. 🔶 Recommendations Grounded in Real Activations: Creator Communities draws on the first-hand expertise of @GameSquare's sister agencies. These are experts who have run creator marketing campaigns for global brands across gaming, lifestyle, and ecommerce. That means recommending creators based on practice, not theory. 🔶 Unbiased Creator Recommendations: Unlike agencies that have certain platforms or creators on their books, Creator Communities operates without pre-arranged partnerships. The discovery process surfaces only the most relevant creators to your needs, based purely on fit for your brand and campaign. Keen to get started? Chat to us now and we’ll explore how Creator Communities fits into your creator marketing plan ➡️ https://buff.ly/nIIkxYr

💥 Explosive Hype for BLAST Open Spring 2026 🏆🔫 Team Vitality just clutched their third major CS2 trophy of 2026 at BLAST Open Spring 2026 in Rotterdam, defusing any remaining doubt about the best team with a 3:0 sweep of Natus Vincere in the grand final 🧹 The tournament fragged its way to 27M hours watched across all platforms, with a peak of 815K concurrent viewers and an average of 292K throughout - a big boost to visibility for the Valve corporation published game. 66% of all hours watched came through co-streams (that's around 17.8M in total). Gaules, the Brazilian streaming institution and the number one CS2 co-streamer, led the charge with 2.6M hours watched. But there was strong European support here too: Behind him, Ukrainian streamer evelone2004 and Russian broadcaster shadowkekw rotated in with their own massive regional audiences at 1.7M and 1.6M hours watched each 🌍 The official BLAST channels saw 7.3M hours watched. As an esports tournament organizer running events across a variety of games (CS2, Rocket League, Dota 2 and more), a key part of BLAST's success has been knowing exactly where to plant the flag for each game they operate and tuning their strategy to fit. For CS2, that means understanding where shooter game communities live online. We mapped that out in our full shooter games on live streaming breakdown right here ➡️ https://buff.ly/LSw7COU

🐿️ Wildlife and Animal Lovers Find Their Habitat on Live Streaming 🦤 Unless you're the kind of person that feeds squirrels on your lunch break, you might be surprised at JUST how popular animal streams are. The Animals category pulled in 125M hours watched across all platforms in Q1 2026. For a sense of scale: Animals sits at the 20th most watched category on streaming this quarter, perched just one spot behind Fortnite at 126M hours watched. Yes: Animal content is basically just as popular as Fortnite! Peely and Monkeys are on the same level🍌🐒 But while viewership is similar, how that viewership is generated couldn't be more different. Fortnite had 1.5M unique channels this quarter, and most big games nestle somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. But Animals had just 7.2K unique channels: That's a tiny flock of channels with extraordinary watch time. And those top channels are mostly squirrel and bird cams, scooping up 4 of the top 5 spots. Red Squirrel Studios leads the foraging pack at 12M hours watched, with Nashville Bird Cam close behind at 11.1M. Those two channels alone account for about 20% of this category's viewership. But... who's actually watching these streams? Well for starters, a lot of people watch these in the background while they do other work for a bit of atmosphere and tranquility. And many Animals streams bill themselves as engaging content for pets: Cats, in particular, are hardwired to watch small animals dart around on screen 🐈 As such, engagement here is probably a little lower than, say, games content. But even this tranquil corner of the attention economy is worth paying attention to 👀 It's like how 24/7 music streams and music learning streams have similarly taken off since Twitch and YouTube fostered their engagement. To see which Music creators are getting attention and why, read all about them here ➡️ https://buff.ly/Oacfdqn

🏜️ Crimson Desert Charges Out of the Gates on Live Streaming ⚔️ Seven years in the making, Pearl Abyss's open-world action RPG Crimson Desert finally launched and players were keen to find everything Pywel had to offer. 2M copies sold on day one and (after a couple patches) Steam user scores climbed to 80%. This positive sentiment was heard across live streaming too 👀 Crimson Desert pulled 27.6M hours watched in its debut week across all platforms, with a peak viewership of 657K and 59K unique channels joining the Greymanes' cause 🩶 Pearl Abyss is rallying the troops with a two-week Twitch Drops campaign running through April 1, getting the most awareness out of its live-streaming community. Viewers that tune in can kit out Kliff with the Blue Scout armor set horse tack for their mounts 🐴 Among top channels, Asmongold (zackrawrr) and Korean streamer 한동숙 (Han Dong-suk) led the charge, tied at 1.2M hours watched each. 풍월량 (Poong Wol-ryang) followed at 753K, with shroud and CohhCarnage rounding out the top five at 472K and 463K. Note that two of those five are Korean creators on Chzzk, both being among the platform's biggest names and well known for throwing themselves headfirst into major AAA releases. For a Korean-developed game, this homegrown support is a massive boost to confidence in the title. In fact, Chzzk streamers keep surfacing at the top of the charts for major releases even for Western games. You can see what we're talking about here in our full introduction to Chzzk ➡️ https://buff.ly/UBUxJFM

🚨 New Feature: One Platform for Your Entire Creator Marketing Process 🪷 We're super excited to be launching this HUGE step forward for the Stream Hatchet platform! If you've ever found yourself juggling five different tools to run a single creator marketing campaign, this one's for you. Creator Communities is Stream Hatchet's new end-to-end solution for the entire creator marketing lifecycle, from finding the right creators for your brand all the way through to activation and reporting. The idea is simple: Everything lives in one place, so you're not briefing multiple agencies on the same vision, syncing data between apps, or hunting for the right version of a spreadsheet every time a new campaign kicks off. With Creator Communities you can now: 1️⃣ Discover creators from our database of 55M+ across 32 platforms 2️⃣ Save them in your dedicated “My Creators” shortlist 3️⃣ Onboard via bulk messaging to reach out and connect 4️⃣ Activate campaigns and distribute promo codes or beta keys as needed 5️⃣ Report on performance with custom dashboards and exportable reports We've built Creator Communities to calm your chaotic campaigns. This is a single, reliable home for every step; your new hub for creator marketing. Not sure if Creator Communities will do everything you need it to? Check out our full blog where we deep dive into how Creator Communities acts as an active extension of your marketing team ➡️ https://buff.ly/dn6uTXt

🚗 Automotive Brands Are Losing Pace on Live Streaming 🏁 Every single automotive brand lost ground on Twitch in 2025 when you look across the top 10 by unique chatters. Sure Tesla led the pack with 490K unique chatters, but it still dropped 10.8% YoY. BMW and Ferrari follow at 411K and 402K respectively, with every brand behind them sliding further still. But there was a ranking reshuffle: Despite seeing the steepest percentage drop of any brand in the top 10 (-20.2%), Mercedes-Benz actually climbed the rankings. Jeep (-4.3%) and Toyota Motor Corporation (-8.2%) did too, making them the three brands overtaking even as the wider category slows down. Mercedes-Benz AG has parked itself adjacent to live-streaming interests: It's been the official automotive partner of the League of Legends World Championship since 2020, delivering the Summoner's Cup to the stage each year in a branded vehicle. That makes it one of the most sustained non-endemic brand commitments in esports 🏆 BMW Group tells the opposite story, though. They sponsored T1, G2 Esports, Cloud9, and Fnatic between 2020 and 2022, then cut all esports partnerships at the start of 2023. They may be second in the rankings today, but they're probably coasting on legacy goodwill. Meanwhile, Porsche AG and Ferrari are carving out their own lane via sim racing, a competitive gaming discipline where drivers race using realistic simulation software replicating real-world tracks and cars. Niche, but deeply aligned with automotive brand identity and a loyal Twitch audience 🏎️ We just explored a bunch of brands that have been killing it on live streaming that might give some inspiration for how to get back into pole position, check that out here ➡️ https://buff.ly/U6OmW5F

🎰 iGaming & Betting Brands: Who Hit the Jackpot in 2026? 🎲 Looking at global searches, the interest in iGaming has grown 8X from 2023 to 2026. That's thanks in no small part to synergy with live streaming: People love covering competitive content there, and that's a great match-up for iGaming fans. So we took a little peek at some iGaming stats from January of 2026 to see how iGaming was being represented on live-streaming platforms 👀 Stake appeared in 6.6K stream titles in January, accounting for 60% of all iGaming brand mentions combined (its closest competitor was 1xBet at just 1.8K). That lead is structural: Kick was co-founded by Stake's backers and built as a platform where gambling content could thrive beyond the reach of Twitch's crackdowns. Unsurprisingly, the top iGaming creators by hours watched are all on KICK as a result 🦵Trainwreckstv alone pulled 15.6M hours watched in January, one of Kick's earliest and most prominent streamers and a fitting figurehead for the platform's iGaming identity. However, iGaming conversation is also thriving beyond Kick. Among YouTube channels with high mentions of iGaming brands, Stokastic DFS leads with 742K hours watched thanks to chat around DraftKings Inc. and FanDuel lineup strategy. Their audience fulfills a niche and is deeply engaged - exactly the kind of betting-literate audience iGaming brands want to reach. Then there's Barstool. Three distinct channels cluster in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th: Barstool Sports (88K hours watched, 1.9M followers), Barstool After Dark (87K), and Barstool Gambling (79K), each targeting a slightly different slice of the betting audience. A blueprint for how a media brand can own iGaming-adjacent viewership across multiple channels at once. If you're curious how prediction markets also fit into this picture, or want to know more creators in the iGaming space, check out our full article here ➡️https://buff.ly/DtRcfCZ

📸 Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake Has Arrived On Live Streaming 🦋 Team Ninja and KoeiTecmo Holdings' remake of the 2003 PS2 survival horror classic launched last week, and those photogenic phantoms of Minakami Village were ready for the age of live streaming. The debut wasn't bad for a niche horror title making its return after more than two decades: 405K hours watched, 14.7K peak viewers, 2.4K average viewers across 1.5K unique channels. NIJISANJI VTuber 葉山舞鈴 (Hayama Marin) of Ohayama Ch. led all streamers with 68.2K hours watched, more than four times second place GAMEゆうな at 16.2K. Then came 秀康 Showcome at 15.1K and おついちTube and RJ的遊戲頻道 both at 12.3K 👻 Three big trends shine through here: Streamers from Asia, YouTube channels, and VTubers were super hyped for the return of Fatal Frame. For a title this deeply rooted in Japanese horror folklore, developed by a Japanese studio, and originally beloved by Japanese audiences back in 2003, that's no surprise at all 🗾 But Hayama Marin earned her top spot: She's a familiar face among the top channels for major survival horror debuts, having been a significant presence during both Silent Hill f and Resident Evil Requiem. Her support even for this relatively small title shows her passion for the genre 👻 Horror remakes have been one of live streaming's most reliable debut drivers for years now, and Fatal Frame 2 slots right into that tradition. We dove deep into the horror remake trend in our full breakdown ➡️ https://buff.ly/86Syw44

👑 Kings League 2026 Kicks Off With 5 Regions Already In Play ⚽ Gerard Piqué and Ibai Llanos' seven-a-side football competition is back on the pitch, and the first three weekends of 2026 have scored goals around the globe 🌍 Brazil is far and away the most hyped region for Kings League 2026 with a massive 529K peak viewers over this last weekend 🚨 That's almost 4X the peak viewers of the next closest region. Meanwhile, Italy has been a consistent viewership generator so far: The region debuted with 127K peak viewers in Week 1 and has held steady with still seeing a peak of 115K in Week 3. Super impressive for a region that only played its first match in 2025. But Mexico temporarily toppled Italy. The Americas circuit, now in its third year, stormed to 135K peak viewers in Week 2, before settling to 85K in Week 3. Latin America's passion for football and live streaming have dovetailed nicely here 🕊️ Spain, where Kings League began back in 2022, sits third once the full field is playing, peaking at 83K in Week 2 and 58K in Week 3. And Germany, the newest arrival, debuted at 48K in Week 2 and but ticked upward to 52K in Week 3 👀 Oh, and this is only 5 of the Kings League's active regions. France and MENA are yet to kick off their 2026 splits, so the Kings League kingdom is about to get a lot more crowded 👑 Curious how sports more broadly are performing on live streaming? Check out our full breakdown here➡️ https://buff.ly/oS052D2

🏷️ The Most Popular Twitch Tags: Twitch Drops Lead, But VTubers Rule The Heart 🩷 For the uninitiated: Twitch tags are the labels streamers attach to their streams to help viewers find content they'll love. Track which ones pull the most hours watched, and you get a pretty telling picture of the Twitch content landscape in 2025. Turns out, there were a LOT more branded and sponsored activations ✨ The DropsEnabled tag sat at the very top with 1.77B hours watched, around 75% more than second place. Streams carrying this tag are running Twitch Drops campaigns, where game developers reward viewers with in-game loot just for watching. The Drops effect is global. Five other non-English variants of the DropsEnabled tag also cracked the Top 30, each pulling 174 - 195M hours watched individually. AND every Drops tag on this list saw a growth in hours watched of 0.5 - 1% from 2024🌍 BIG caveat here though: Drops tags are auto-applied to participating streams by Twitch itself. So which tags deliberately chosen by users performed best..? Viewed this way, VTuber leads with 1.01B hours watched - and remember this is on Twitch, not even on YouTube Gaming where VTubers reign supreme! ADHD follows at 816M (primarily used by creators signalling fast-paced chaotic content, and only partially by neurodivergent streamers building their community), then Chill (685M) IRL (530M), and Anime (515M). There's a little wrinkle in this data though regarding language. Tags like VTuber, IRL, and Anime rank higher partly because non-English speakers use the same terms. Tags that need translating get split across multiple entries (like the Drops tag examples), so tags that cross language barriers naturally rank higher. Looking for a little more advice on how to interpret tag rankings, or maybe wanting to see the growth of tag popularity over time? Check out our full deep dive on Twitch Tags here ➡️ https://buff.ly/6lClwWA