Almost immediately after setting its record high of nearly 147,000 current players in September 2020, Rocket League’s Steam player count began to drop, reaching the deepest point in the last five years.
According to data presented by Mejores Apuestas, the number of Rocket League players on the world’s leading gaming platform dropped by 60% in the last year and hit around 58,500 last week.
A Sharp Fall After a Record 2020
As a combination of racing and a football game, Rocket League was released as an improvement from an earlier version known as Battle-Cars, which did not reach the same level of success. Soon after its launch in 2015, it became one of the most popular titles in the gaming world.
Moreover, the E-Sports Observer data also showed Rocket League became one of the top games in the eSports industry, with the eighth highest cumulative prize pool of $3 million in the first half of the year.
Still, the number of people playing Psyonix’s game on Steam has dropped significantly over time. According to Steam Charts data, from 2016 to 2019, the monthly average number of Rocket League players floated between 50,000 and 80,000, with April 2016 as the peak month in this period.
However, as the entire gaming industry exploded amid the COVID-19 lockdowns, the number of players hit an all-time high in 2020.
After reaching 119,000 current players in March last year, Rocket League’s Steam player count dropped to around 70,000 in the next five months, right before hitting an all-time peak of 146,900 in September. Statistics show this figure has been falling ever since, with April and August 2021 as the only exceptions.
Last month, the Rocket League’s peak number of players amounted to 58,500 or 82,000 less than in the same month a year ago.
Twitch Viewership Also Plunging
Besides losing players on the world’s largest gaming platform, Rocket League has also witnessed a massive drop in Twitch viewership this year. After reaching an all-time high of 36,500 average viewers in April, its Twitch audience halved to 18,800 last month.
Also, statistics show that Rocket League events on the video streaming platform were watched for a combined 13.6 million hours in October, significantly down from an all-time peak of 26.3 million in April this year, and almost 40% less than in the same month a year ago.
