According to a report by Streams Charts, three racing games joined the 2021 Top 10 list of most streamed games in the Sports category on Twitch.tv. Trackmania, iRacing and F1 2021 were all on this year’s Sports Games list. Each platform contributed tens of millions of hours watched on Twitch alone. That isn’t even counting any hours watched on YouTube, Facebook, or any other streaming service.
Fairly new to the scene in terms of esports popularity, racing games in general took off in the middle of 2020 when things began to shut down due to the virus. According to the 2020 chart, iRacing was the only racing game included, at tenth overall. Now this year, while it did move up the rankings to eighth, it’s been surpassed by Trackmania which sits at seventh.
While both Trackmania and iRacing have been around for years, the 2021 Formula 1 game released in July. In less than six months, F1 2021 had 13.54 million hours watched. That’s pretty impressive considering iRacing had 19.72 million hours watched and Trackmania had 25.62 million hours watched. While these titles are distant from the more popular titles like FIFA and NBA, racing games did beat baseball on this list. Also of note, the Madden NFL franchise completely missed out on making the Top 10. Both the 2020 and 2021 Madden games were ahead of iRacing in 2020.
Per the report, FIFA 21 dominated the rankings with 247.5 million hours watched by viewers. FIFA 22, which released 27th September last year, managed to climb to third overall. FIFA 22 compiled 154.46 million hours in just the last two months of the year alone. Rocket League split the two titles with the runner up in the category. The popular car/football hybrid (a.k.a. SocCar) amassed 198.13 million hours of viewing time.
These numbers are compiled by Esports Charts, an analytical service that compiles data based on esports competitions, streams, and income, among other metrics. Their streaming specific compiling site, Streams Charts, puts together figures from streaming on platforms such as Twitch, Trovo, and Facebook Gaming. While gaming categories such as Grand Theft Auto V and League of Legends have hours watched numbers in 2021 in the billions, it is still incredible that there were millions of hours spent watching virtual racing take place.
2022 could be the year that racing games and esports takes off even further. Will you be watching some of the top competitions set to take place this upcoming calendar year? What other racing games would you like to see ranked on these viewership lists? Are there any new games in 2022 that you’d expect to see? Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below.
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