‘Beast Games’ Flips the Scales Between Online Creators and Streaming Giants

After months of hype and anticipation, Amazon and MrBeast’s big-budget reality competition show, “Beast Games,” finally came out in late December. Now that it’s a month old and halfway through its debut season on Prime Video, it seems like a good time to ask the burning question Amazon has been surprisingly quiet about answering: How many people are watching this thing?

Luckily, streaming data from Luminate shows “Beast Games” is bringing in solid viewership, but with its current trajectory, it may not be the megahit Amazon and MrBeast were hoping for when they landed on its $100 million-plus price tag.

Per Luminate’s weekly streaming TV chart, “Beast Games” was the most-watched show on Amazon Prime Video and the 13th most-watched streaming show the week following its two-episode premiere. When going by its 1.7 million views, however, the show jumps into sixth place overall, but either way, it’s blocked from the top spots by numerous Netflix dramas and Paramount+’s latest rugged Western, “Landman.”

In terms of views over time, newer episodes of “Beast Games” are seeing increasingly smaller spikes following their respective premieres (the episodes drop on Thursday, but most people seem to tune in the next day) and are losing long-term momentum faster. The fifth and most recent episode had the second-smallest Friday spike (715,429 views) and the steepest decline so far, reaching below 150,000 views on Tuesday (a 79% decline from its second-day peak).

Looking at total views for the first five days of each “Beast Games” episode, the third episode was the most watched at 2.2 million views, while the fifth achieved just above 2 million views.

This could mean the show has found its plateau of interested audiences, but it might also be a fairly common midseason slump that will pick back up once the final episodes drop and people decide to binge-watch.

For now, total minutes watched also suggests the show may have hit its peak audience. The trajectory of this and last week is almost identical: Both peaked at around 69 million minutes on day two, and both saw around a 60% decline by day five. The best week was after the third episode dropped, which had a smaller day-two peak but only declined by some 48% by the end of the week.

So overall, it would be disingenuous to say “Beast Games” is a flop — the show is performing well. But considering the ungodly amount of money Amazon has put into it, the show itself being marketed as the biggest competition of all time and Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson’s reputation as a relentless perfectionist who’s unsatisfied until he breaks another record, “well” may not be good enough.

All of this raises a key question: If not record-breaking viewership — jury's still out on that, but it’s looking less likely by the week — what do Amazon and MrBeast get by doing “Beast Games”? So far, the most tangible things they’ve gotten are a class-action lawsuit and a flood of negative reviews.

Prime Video and YouTube are obviously not identical platforms and thus any direct comparison is dicey, but it’s worth pointing out that MrBeast currently has over 344 million subscribers. His “prequel” video to “Beast Games” on YouTube has gained almost 150 million views in three weeks. Prime Video, meanwhile, has around 200 million monthly viewers as of last spring.

For years, the unofficial milestone for an online creator who “made it” was jumping from YouTube to a mainstream entity, whether that be a TV network or streaming platform. For Donaldson, a lifelong disciple of the church of YouTube, maybe making that jump to Amazon crossed off an item on his content creator bucket list.

He certainly doesn’t need Amazon’s co-sign to prove himself as a mainstream creative force — his high-budget YouTube videos, billions of video views, multiple product lines and sprawling North Carolina production studio more than prove that fact.

If anything, the argument can be made that instead of an online creator seeking credibility by associating with a streaming platform, it was Amazon who aimed to gain by association. With “Beast Games,” Amazon can now say that it was the first streamer to work with MrBeast. It wrote the biggest check and won the bidding war. And it now has a direct part to play in MrBeast’s orbit, which continues to expand rapidly despite numerous controversies over the past year.

Like the show or not, “Beast Games” has shifted the dynamic between independent online creators and the entertainment industry’s gatekeepers in a profound way. Whether or not other creators can follow up this new precedent may depend on the show’s overall success, but the prospect is an exciting one for the creator economy in a time when creators are on increasingly equal footing with the industry’s main players.