Catalyst Sports & Media

Overwatch League Viewership Surprises With Smashing First Week Results

Avi Bhuiyan•

Summary:

Viewership for the first week of Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League has been a smash success, far surpassing industry projections.

Our Take:

With $20 million franchise price tags, the full support of multi-billon dollar behemoth Activision-Blizzard, and unprecedented marketing and promotion all behind the launch of the Overwatch League, expectations were sky high for the league’s launch.

Despite high expectations for the league, however, many were skeptical that the league could command Tier 1 esports viewership. Overwatch’s average viewership across all channels on Twitch averaged less than 30,000 this past year– while respectable, there are multiple individual streamers such as Shroud who regularly eclipse that mark, underscoring that Activision Blizzard had to convince a lot of people who don’t normally casually watch Overwatch streams to tune in for OWL’s esports experience.

The results for the league’s debut were nothing short of breath-taking.

Viewership for Day 1 on Twitch reached a peak of over 430,000, within striking distance of both the NA LCS Summer Split’s regular season peak in 2017 and the first week of ELEAGUE’s ongoing 2018 Boston CS:GO Major. However, the peak dipped to less than 250,000 on Day 2 and 150,000 on Day 3 according to ESC. Even still, these are very impressive numbers.

It was very much expected that initial interest in the OWL by both fans and detractors would be hot, resulting in sky-high viewership to start the season. Moreover, OWL was very creative in wooing viewership, ranging from billboards in Times Square to the controversial practice of having the OWL stream auto-play inside of the Overwatch client. Many publishers including Valve and Riot have links to esports streams in their game clients, but having them auto-play upon log-in is much less common.

As the season settles in we’ll get a more accurate picture of what week-to-week viewership will look like for the league. One week of data is not enough to draw long-term conclusions from. That said, given that Twitch “drops” of in-game items for stream viewers, a feature which has significantly boosted viewership of other esports broadcasts such as CS:GO tournaments, has not yet come on line, there is clear momentum on the horizon independent of how the league progresses from Week 1 to 2.

There is no doubt that Overwatch League can attract viewership, the next question is whether it can do so consistently. All eyes will be on OWL’s Week 2 broadcast tomorrow to see how well the momentum from the league’s spectacular debut carries over.

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Overwatch League Viewership Surprises With Smashing First Week Results

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