The hardcore shooter Escape from Tarkov has done it again: Every 6 months the game skyrockets on the streaming platform Twitch, and especially around the New Year, the hardcore shooter creates a real hype. What kind of game is this and how does it manage to do that?
How is it currently going for the hardcore shooter on Twitch? Phenomenal. Escape from Tarkov has been the biggest game on Twitch for the last 7 days. Only one category has been watched longer – Just Chatting.
The shooter amassed just over 51 million viewer hours in the last 7 days, corresponding to a growth of over 1,100 %.
Just Chatting came in at around 59.5 million hours, the first game behind Tarkov was League of Legends, which achieved just over 19 million hours (as of: 04.01.22 / via sullygnome.com).
The hardcore shooter Escape from Tarkov is a brutally hard niche game with high entry barriers and potential for frustration. Nevertheless, the hardcore shooter creates hype among players and viewers every 6 months. MeinMMO takes a look at what’s behind it.
You can watch the trailer for the Wipe-Patch 0.13 here:
Wipe hype for Escape from Tarkov
The trigger for the recurring hype is the so-called “Wipe”. This resets the complete progress of all players back to 0.
Escape from Tarkov is an extraction shooter, everything revolves around loot. Either you collect equipment for your own inventory, for upgrading the hideout, or for the various missions of the traders for reputation points.
With the wipe, all the collected progress is gone, players start only with their inventory, which is determined by the purchased game edition. This is the general trigger for the hype.
But there’s more to it. Because not every game could simply take away the progress of its players every 6 months and create hype that way.
The perfect game for streaming? And there are Twitch drops too
Escape from Tarkov is a nasty hardcore shooter that grinds newcomers through a meat grinder. You can run around the map for 20 minutes without problems and without enemy contact, and a bullet from an unknown direction ends the adventure.
There’s also no kill cam or anything – your eyes close, you see the after-match report. Especially for streamers, this complex and brutally difficult shooter is optimal.
There’s always something to explain, every step should be well thought out and can be shared with the chat beforehand. In addition, there are strong emotions when a fierce battle ends successfully or with your face in the grass.
Just watching can generate thrills and a “thrill”. This in turn leads to the desire to tackle Tarkov yourself.
Once you start playing, you don’t stop watching it on Twitch afterwards. For years, Tarkov has had Twitch drops after the wipe events. It was the first game besides the shooter Valorant that profited massively from the new drop system on Twitch.
The first hype came for Escape from Tarkov at the end of 2019 / beginning of 2020. Since then, many old players return at this time of year. Many newcomers also try the game for the first time around the wipe at year’s end.
Apart from the wipe and the Twitch hype, there are also very simple reasons for the current upturn. Because the latest patch brought the map “Streets of Tarkov” – it was in development for over 2.5 years and brought urban battles into the game.
Tarkov is a phenomenon in gaming, and rightly so. With its uncompromising mechanics, it has shown millions of players and viewers how much fun difficult games can be. Thus, it has even made a subgenre among shooters known – the extraction shooters.
The influence has now reached a point where even the major players in the shooter market can no longer ignore the development around this subgenre and have launched their own offshoots or modes.
Like Battlefield with “Hazard Zone” or Call of Duty with the free “DMZ mode”. However, the regular hype from Tarkov has not harmed that so far.
