NEWS - Thursday, January 18, 2018
Overwatch League Opening Week Drew a lot of Viewers
Well, well, well, it seems that there are a lot of people who love Overwatch, and Blizzard’s foray into an Overwatch League drew a lot of people who wanted to watch the action. In the first four days of competition, 12 teams of the what is now known as the worlds first ’global city-based professional eSports league’.
Buoyed by a newly announced two-year deal with Twitch, as it is now the Overwatch League’s exclusive worldwide third-party digital broadcast partner, the opening day drew an impressive average audience per minute of 408,000, and an average of 280,000 per minute for the week.
To add more of a perspective of how many people check out gameplay for this new eSports league, more than 10 million viewers tuned in over the four-day period via Twitch, MLG, and Chinese streaming partners ZhanQi TV, NetEase CC, and Panda TV—not to mention the countless additional viewers at watch parties worldwide. On Twitch and MLG alone, the peak concurrent online audience of 437,000 hit during the highly anticipated day-one matchup between Dallas Fuel and Seoul Dynasty. In addition, tickets to Blizzard Arena Los Angeles were sold out for the entirety of opening week.
We have to say that is a lot of Overwatch fans checking out live action as it occurs, It will be interesting to see if they can keep up the viewership as each play week goes by.
Source: Press Release
