Viewbotting on Twitch: How Widespread Is It Really?

Last week, Twitch’s new detection system for viewbotting went live. Most headlines stopped at the topline: “Twitch lost 20% of its viewership overnight.” That number is technically accurate, but incomplete.

When we dug deeper into the data, a more nuanced picture emerged...

What we measured

Instead of stopping at the topline, we ran a controlled analysis:

• Compared the last 30 days pre-crackdown vs. the first week post-crackdown
• Controlled for seasonality and day-of-week effects (e.g., comparing Monday vs. previous Mondays, not just raw averages)
• Broke down impact by game ecosystem, creator density, and peak vs. off-peak hours

Key Findings

Context matters.

• On average, Twitch viewership fell ~18% per day, but the impact wasn’t uniform across the platform.

Creator ecosystems matter.

• Games with many active creators (League, Valorant, CS, Dota) saw only modest changes. Their ecosystems are statistically resilient because no single channel dominates.
  
  
• Games with fewer creators experienced much sharper declines. Smaller ecosystems are more fragile, and easier to distort with botted audiences.

Timing matters.

• Weekends showed the steepest drops. Bot activity historically peaks during high-traffic windows, when competition for visibility is greatest.

Genre matters.

• Competitive / hardcore titles proved the most resilient.
• Casual and mid-tier titles had the highest percentage of creators with declines, making discoverability in these segments easier to skew under inflated viewership.
  

What this means for marketers

The crackdown is just one round in an ongoing bot farm arms race. Platforms plug holes, botters adapt, and the cycle repeats. Analytics platforms are racing to flag anomalies. That’s useful, but if you’re solely prioritizing bot traffic in your decision making process you’ll likely be chasing diminishing returns.

At Gamesight, we go deeper:

• We don’t just look at views, we connect them to clicks, installs, and revenue.
• Because we tie creators to attribution data, it’s often immediately obvious when inflated viewership isn’t driving downstream action.

Certain communities appear to be more subject to bot traffic, so it's important to take a holistic approach to your marketing (looking for broad audience receptiveness, targeting cohorts, etc.) and have ways of measuring success beyond "viewers."