In a nutshell: Twitter has announced that 2021 was its biggest-ever year for gaming tweets, with over 2 billion posts across the entire 12 months. The company also revealed the ten most talked-about titles on its platform last year, the counties that tweeted most about gaming, and several eSports-related stats.
Rishi Chadha, Twitter's Global Head of Gaming Content Partnerships, posted that there were 2.4 billion tweets about gaming in 2021. That marks a 14% increase compared to the previous year and more than ten times the number of gaming tweets sent out in 2017. Chadha added that 2021 Q4 was the biggest quarter for gaming conversation ever on Twitter.
Chadha also revealed the most talked-about games of the year. Sitting in the number one spot is Genshin Impact, miHoYo's open-world action RPG that arrived on Android, iOS, PC, and the PlayStation 4 in 2020 (and PS5 in 2021). The free-to-play title is also coming to Nvidia's GeForce Now streaming service (it's already in limited beta) and the Nintendo Switch.
In second place is the ever-popular Apex Legends, while Final Fantasy, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Minecraft, and Fortnite are also on the list.
The reason why some of those games might be unfamiliar to many westerners could be explained by the next category: countries tweeting most about games. Here we see that Japan holds the top position---there are several Japanese titles on the most-talked-about games list. It's followed by the United States in second place, South Korea in third, and fourth-place Thailand.
Looking at the most-tweeted-about gaming events, E3 was number one. It was recently announced that, like last year, this year's expo would be online-only, a result of rising Covid cases. The Game Awards were the second most-talked about event, followed by the Xbox Games Showcase.
In addition to listing the game creators that were mentioned in most tweets---see below---Twitter revealed a slew of eSports-related stats. Check out the entire post here.
