Elden Ring storms up Twitch charts as Kai Cenat dominates

Jacob Hale
Elden Ring logo on black background with image of Kai Cenat smiling

Elden Ring is seeing a monumental resurgence on Twitch thanks to Kai Cenat’s historic stream, fighting (and struggling) to complete one of the hardest games of recent years.

Elden Ring released in February 2022 to instant fanfare, with FromSoftware notorious for creating some of the best and most difficult video games out there. This is especially true if you’re a complete beginner like Kai Cenat was before starting his stream.

Having been live on Twitch for well over 150 hours at the time of writing, Kai finally beat Melania late on Thursday, May 16, after 433 deaths, leaving him with just a small handful of bosses left to beat.

All those hours pumped into the game are not for nothing, either, with the game absolutely storming up the Twitch ranks thanks to Kai and his endless stream. Five days after the stream started, Elden Ring has become the number one most trending game on the platform, and is in the top five for most watched categories on Twitch in the last week.

That moves Elden Ring above Counter-Strike 2, Fortnite, Dota 2, Warzone, Apex Legends, and way more, with a whopping 13.7m hours watched according to Twitch stats tracker SullyGnome.

Twitch categoryWatch time (hours)% change
Just Chatting49,925,731-3.2%
Grand Theft Auto V30,726,209-6.2%
League of Legends29,415,993+13.6%
Valorant18,503,335-14.8%
Elden Ring13,717,718+657.7%

Kai himself makes up a large majority of that, too, with over 11.4m hours watched since he started the game and a peak viewership of over 200,000.

The stream hasn’t quite hit the 7-day mark yet so it may well even push above Valorant in the top 5 most watched games of the past week.

However, the jump up to League of Legends, GTA V, and Just Chatting, are so huge that it may be too big of an ask for even Kai Cenat.