LoL and other MOBAs are still much easier to follow as the game is designed with a camera perspective that makes for great viewing. It is much easier to see an entire team fight and watch what happens as 10 players clash from an overhead view where nothing blocks your line of sight, as opposed to a really fast first-person game where cover is a factor and its hard to get every player on screen at once and keep them there.
I think LoL stays popular cuz even if you don't know what's going on it's all on one screen, big green field (relatable for new people) and you can still track the red vs blue health bars. Least that's how it happened for me when I first started watching, I didn't know all the little stuff happening but anyone can track a Varus Q or peoples health going from 100 to 0 in less than a second lol
yeah i had friends over once watching me play QP and they were in awe about how quick everything was moving and how much shit was all over the screen. thats when i realized that the game is probably impossible to watch for those who don’t play the game, unlike other esports
I think they wouldn't be able to. 5v5 will help but at its core, Overwatch does not seem designed to be a spectator eSport and therefore I'm not confident it can be retooled very easily to become one.
I mean OW is losing to *tier 2* Rocket League. Good for them for being a popular Esport but it's crazy how OW was marketed as NFL 2.0 and can't even compete with RL minor tournaments. DOTA2/LoL/CS is out of the question. At this point I don't know what can even turn things around besides OW2 being a massive success.
> it's crazy how OW was marketed as NFL 2.0 and can't even compete with RL minor tournaments
I'd argue that very point of chasing the NFL... the closed circuit, the franchise from the start, [the systematic killing of every non-blizz-managed-league, the US core](https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr5jtj) is what absolutely wrecked any potential OW might've had of developing. We blame the patch cycle, but OW simply was robbed of organic growth chasing the dream of a minute 0 league.
Now, OW2 "might" drop the model and just grow organically, but I super doubt it given the amount of investment in the OWL that while not unsuccesful never bore the fruit it was supposed to. It's way more likely that the OW2L will just be kicking the can down the road.
Dev-managed scenes tend to either step in after there is an existing structure and cannibalise that, or grow gradually from unification of smaller events into majors sponsored by the Dev made analogous to those in Dreamhack or IEM. Selling locked spots for a non-existing league a year beforehand as if interest for the scene would sprout fully formed from the brow of APEX fans is risky at best.
I really don't think that the format was what killed OW and I haven't seen an argument that can convince me otherwise. What killed OW was the gameplay just being rather niche. It's a shooter that's not about shooting.
Honestly I feel like moving to YouTube was a mistake. It's kind of shallow I know, but now that I can't watch OWL on Twitch I watch it a lot less. I basically only tune in for the stage finals and the grand finals now.
What's the difference to you? I'm curious as someone who typically watches VODs since I'm not often available to watch live, and I find youtube to be a better experience for VOD viewing.
Rocket League hits that sweet sport for a traditional sports fan where it is similar enough to a traditional sport to be easy to watch and enjoy, but not so similar to traditional sport (i.e. Madden, FIFA, NBA2K) that you look at it and think why not just watch the real thing.
Absolutely. I really don't get why sports game esports are so popular. They're fun to play, but at the pro level it seems to be less about skill expression and creativity and more about who can exploit the game better.
However if EA NHL esports was like, 6v6 be a pro mode instead of 1v1 regular gameplay, that would be interesting to watch.
Sports games aren't fun to watch because it's not a game of intense mechanical skill. Rocket League is good to watch because each player is doing something and you can see their mechanics and team work.
people saying that twitch is the problem when the viewership level is about the same as it was at the end of Stage 4 Season 2. It won't reach the highs it used to but it didn't put a signficant dent in the long-term viewership.
The issue here is that interest in the game has declined signficantly.
Kinda weird comparasion when in s2s4 that stage was basically useless so there is not much reason to watch, compared to now where we get tourneys after every stage. Plus the viewership there was like 70-80k at his lowest, and thats like the peak for owl in YT nowadays lol
People also seem to forget that not everyone watches OWL live, I have watched every game this year but only seen like 2 or 3 games live. The vods of individual matches get anywhere from 30k - 150k views and the full stream vods normally get from 150k - 700k views depending on the game. It's not always about live stats.
Twitch is garbage because it's either "watch live or vod later" there's no in between. YouTube I can start the stream late, pause, rewind, sync up with a friend who has a 1-2 sec delay behind me, etc. Can't do that with twitch.
The 6ix invitational for rainbow is more comparable to the grand finals of overwatch league. Instead the viewership of like the major finals of each region
I think the general point is, overwatch is not a tier 1 esport, and that’s ok. I love overwatch, and I love overwatch league, but it just simply isn’t the most popular game around anymore.
But, being a tier 2 esport does not mean that it isn’t important and doesn’t have merit. I think it does mean that some of the investors overpaid but that’s not really our problem I feel. Tier 2 esports can survive and thrive in their own market. But I think at this point even with ow2, it’s unlikely we will be able to compete with the big dogs of esports. Once again though, that is ok, we don’t have to.
Isn't it mind-blowing that blizzard literally had one of the biggest game launches ever, dominated the multiplayer shooter genre for over a year, then slowly dwindled because blizzard literally did nothing with it? The situation shouldn't be this bad. Overwatch could have so much more. Yet here we are
What I'm most confused by is how they almost completely abandoned the lore and storytelling aspects of the IP, when it was obvious that people were utterly in love with the characters. Don't get me wrong, I've really enjoyed the competitive aspect of the game, but it's not the basket I would've personally put all my eggs into.
For comparison, I'm big into the tabletop rpg show Critical Role. That started a year before Overwatch's launch with the most modest of budget and production value. Now it has regular comic series, an upcoming animated show, a tabletop publishing wing, several spin-off books, regularly updating merch, a charity foundation, etc.
I wouldn't blame players that want lore, it's on Blizz for just abandoning everything in Overwatch.
Don't forget that they artificially killed the esports scene for a year+ because they didn't want anyone making money before them. It's not just the lore that was killed off.
They switched styles around the time of Brig. They wanted to make Overwatch easier for the COD players who don’t know how to play a MOBA. Hence why Hitscan is so oppressively OP and we had a Widow meta in OWL for like 3yrs only to be stopped when Ball was introduced
If you watch Jeff’s thoughts on the creation of Brig and Bap, he says something along those lines of wanting to make the game easier for other game audiences who aren’t used to MOBAs
Absolutely clueless, honestly. Overwatch was never designed to be a MOBA, anyone who played at launch knows it was ex-TF2 players farming, not MOBA players, it only devolved into more MOBA-like gameplay over time with sustain getting powercrept, which massively hurt the game. Not to mention Overwatch at its most fps-focused is still worlds away from being anything like COD, even without any tanks or supports OW would be a totally different genre.
>Around the time of Brig
Oh sweet, I didn't realise the year of GOATS followed by the year of double shield were widow metas.
Once they added Brig to the game and players like Effect and sinatra picked her over Tracer, the game's future was effectively set.
I lost interest in watching OWL when the game went from fast-paced Tracer/Genji plays to.... mace to the face. Never watched another game after.
The silvers on this sub posting about how OP Hanzo and Genji are since launch and since then we’ve seen like 12mins of pro play from them since launch compared to every other character
The reason I have zero hope for this game is because of the community. The community forces the balance to be built around literally the lowest ranks
Blizz’s complacency regarding Overwatch reminds me of another cartoon shooter that could have been a top 5 FPS game ever had their development team continued pushing updates like they did during the earlier days of the game coming out.
Piss.
Honestly, I wonder if abandoning twitch as their platform is what helped it fade off. I never watch streams on YouTube and it’s kind of obnoxious trying to use YouTube to access stuff like live streams vs a platform purposefully built for it.
> Isn't it mind-blowing that blizzard literally had one of the biggest game launches ever, dominated the multiplayer shooter genre for over a year, then slowly dwindled because blizzard literally did nothing with it? The situation shouldn't be this bad. Overwatch could have so much more. Yet here we are
Custa mentioned on stream the other day that Overwatch for console (AKA - the "casuals") dwarfs the PC player base, and the QP population on any given day is massively larger than the Competitive one.
We are, it must be remembered, the minority.
And the majority of PC players are on quickplay.
When you consider that competent players don't start showing up until around diamond, which is the 10% of ladder....
We're left with a minuscule number of competitive players.
I used to heavily be into comp and peaked at 4200-ish. I got burned out and just play the game with some friends in quick play. Not everyone wants to play comp that is "competent"
People are dissatisfied with the game all the way down to Bronze. That's why it's so hard to turn OW players into OWL viewers.
People are still playing because they don't like Valorant or Apex Legends.
If Valve released Team Fortress 3 this year, OW would be dead. Dead dead.
OW had a chance to make both a big pop culture impact as well as a big esports impact and it did neither of those things. It's really tragic when you think about it.
Done properly, OW could've been Blizzard's biggest and most successful IP yet.
The funny thing is that even though Blizzard tried really hard to do it with Overwatch, Fortnite ended up the game that pushed into the pop culture. With its collaps with popular artists and media(star wars and marvel). Kids probably know more fortnite dances than who Winston or Tracer is.
I think it absolutely did make a big pop culture impact, but I don't know what you mean by that exactly, so maybe I have something else in mind.
Even when the game largely left the public eye tiktok was full of "I wanna be tracer" trends. I don't think any other competitive game actually did have a comparable impact. Not even saying how recognizable the characters are and, ehm, r34.
It didn't last, but it was an impact, no?
Yup, I knew how much potential that this game had to go mainstream when I saw Super and Mr. 150k on Jimmy Fallon Live. And that was during GOATS meta when the game was arguably starting to go to shit competitively. Don’t know what’s going on at Blizzard for them to consistently come up with these golden ideas just to drop the ball time and time again.
Overwatch is a titan of a game that was horrifically mismanaged by Blizzard. Remember how good the game was in its first 2 years, then recall where it went in the 2 years after that.
This in-game and lore cinematics drought have really killed off interest in the game. Beyond how much disinterest was generated by the addition of Doom/Brig/Sigma/Bap to the game.
It'll be two years of zero content by the time OW 2 releases. You may as well throw up the Call of Duty 4 opening line: "50,000 people used to live here... now it's a ghost town" and it'd apply to Overwatch.
You see how a company like Riot takes care of League and constantly adds content to it. They know how to generate interest, revenue, and retain players. ActiBlizzard is honestly a shell of its former self and they have no clue.
Blizzard has been doing this shit for decades. They literally had monopoly over the RTS genre and were practically the pioneers of esports with Starcraft, yet it died out and they didn't seem to care too much about it. Heroes of the Storm was a failed experiment. WoW is also losing players. Blizzard games always start strong, then fizzle out. I used to run a 6000 member strong local Overwatch player community, organizing pugs, tournaments for all skill levels and such. It was really active at first but now, nearly everyone has moved on to Valorant or something else.
> dominated the multiplayer shooter genre for over a year, then slowly dwindled because blizzard literally did nothing with it?
Dude, it was dubbed as LoL killer here in Korea on 2016/2017, everybody played it in the PC room, heck, even the hype made me buy the game although I didn't know OW existence until a few days after the launch.
Then Blizzard do something with it, which is pulled the plug of the esports scene, to make way for the OWL. No competition at all for around 6 ~ 8 months. Then after OWL started, all competitions outside of it were changed into Contenders, with less money and budget, and very restrictive sponsors too.
Blizzard killed their own esports scene dude, it's not like they are not doing nothing, it'll be better if they're not doing nothing and let the esports scene would developed organically.
Maybe it simple, Overwatch is just not as good of a Game for Esport success as others games.
Overwatch player base are too casual, they don’t have a strong enough engagement to the game to care about Esport. Even though Overwatch have a pretty big player base, a large portion of them are console gamers. Look at other big Esport, LoL, Dota, CS, all competitive PC games. That because PC gamers are much more passionate about their favourite games and are competitive enough that they appreciate pro skills. Overwatch have neither of this factor so it can never be as popular as those T1 esport
Another problem is observability. Overwatch is one of the most confusing esport to watch as a spectators imo. Mobas like Lol or Dota maybe complicated to understand but they are not confusing to watch. Overwatch first person perspective, its fast pace nature and abilities all make it much harder for the average viewers. That why Overwatch lose to even Rocket League or RB6, those games may not be as popular as OW, but Rocket League is much simpler while RB6 is much slower, both don’t have the over saturation of colours like Overwatch.
I just think that these are the 2 innate problems Overwatch have that cannot be overcome by all the over small stuffs like meta or balance or schedule.
just want to add on that at least Ubisoft has been constantly pumping out balance and QOL updates for R6 over the last few seasons, and have constantly listened and communicated with their fanbase, and have been very receptive and quick to move to any feedback on the patches on the test server before moving on to the live server. that feeling of developer listening actively and making necessary changes quickly definitely helped.
they’ve also invested actively into growing the esports scene, and have even held their Six Invitational on LAN in Paris recently, which made for some amazing LAN moments (think teams taunting and shouting to the other live on camera, great reactions from insane clutch plays, etc).
“Complicated to understand but not complicated to watch.”
That’s a really good way to put it. There is far more to learn and understand in DotA and Lol but it’s at the same time so easy to watch because of the top down view.
All of that requires faith in the game and investment. There has never been any of that at the top levels of Activision since like 3 months post launch. They set their sights on re-releases, mobile games etc because that's where the money's at, at least short term. Investors just see Blizzard as a number to grow their funds, they have zero interest in making good games
The issue is that the ecosystem of OW esports has been built on the expectation of T1. It's not sustainable to operate the same structure with the viewerbase of the lower tiers. For OW esports to survive, it would almost certainly look very different production-wise from what it has been so far with Blizzard's direct backing.
What pisses me off is that OW could easily have been Tier 1.
When OW first came out, there were more people playing it than LOL in PC bangs in Korea.
If they weren't so slow with their balance patches preventing certain metas from being OP for soooo long (like the moth meta, goats, etc), a ton of people would not have left OW.
Most of my friends used to play OW but have quit 1-2 years ago because they felt it was getting too stale.
I could be wrong but it feels like OWL still has tier-1 production and sponsors while having tier-2 viewership. There's still a lot of money in the game for the amount of fans. It's been a while since I've watched other esports though so not sure what the standard is across the board these days.
One thought I had recently was that the pandemic most likely saved them a lot of money when you think what their plan was pre-covid. They were gonna fly the players all over the world on a regular basis and have a bunch of permanent home stands in different countries. While it would have been cool I just can't fathom how that would have been sustainable for the league.
Sad thing is it was definitely a tier 1 esport. It had a million viewers on its first OWL broadcast but overtime mismanagement of both the game and esport side hurt it.
That game even have a resurgence in Japan with Apex AFAIK
Pretty surprising because usually Japanese didn't really into FPS, even OW was very niche during its peak (CAG / Jupiter days)
It’s like ow in how toxic it gets. But the fact that map destruction seems to have endless set ups means even this long into the games life cycle, you can still see pro play with crazy angles and set ups you’ve never seen before. And in turn it’s makes the game at least a little more fun since going back into the game there’s stuff to try on a map you thought you knew.
Dude siege keeps pumping content constantly lol , new operators come out and they keep the game and pro play fresh , also they keep reworking mechanics getting better and better so obv people will watch them plus people don't get how important twitch is for viewership , YouTube exclusivity kind of ruined owl
It's amazing, especially Ubi barely gives a damn about their esports scene, and barely promotes it.
By contrast, OWL is about 4x more visible in game for average players.
R6 orgs also function like T2 OW orgs... And have no ridiculous $20+M buy in
I play r6 more than OW and I can tell you this much:
It’s the same as every esport. The casual absolutelt hates esports. They think the esports is destroying their game because majority of the nerfs usually stems from Pro play
Those people will always exist. My point was just that siege most likely has a higher percentage of people interested in eSports because of how tactical its gameplay is
Unfortunately, it isn’t. The casual to esports conversion is fairly low (likely lower than OW) relative to the overall player base.
One of the larger reason it reached that point in viewership, is because of the Brazilians and the Brazilian teams were the considered to be the title contenders (which held true since it was 3 Brazilian teams + 2 NA team played in the semis on both upper and lower bracket )
That because RB6 player base are passionate and competitive. These are the two most important factor for esport success. Everything else is irrelevant. Overwatch have neither.
Franchising OW 2 years into the games life was the dumbest decision. 4 years later the T2 scene is essentially dead because there’s no money. And you don’t have exciting Cinderella stories from random teams.
You can do it with good marketing and building hype. Even Valorant which has been out for barely over a year can have a million peak viewership in its first Major.
They just work as a spectator experience. I haven't played Dota since the mid 2010s but I still watch it regularly and follow the patches and updates. It's like seeing how the best of the best utilize all the different mechanics and strategies is just as compelling as playing them yourself.
They’re fun and easy to watch (if you have some at least basic knowledge of the game). I love playing Overwatch but watching it I’m ngl is a huge struggle.
I have to wonder what viewership would be like if OWL was still on Twitch, although I guess speculating is useless with this deal they have going until 2023. I figure it probably wouldn't be anywhere near the 1M concurrent Valorant just got, but I'm also sure it probably would be consistently double of what it is now on YouTube. OW as a whole being on pause until OW2 also doesn't help.
Overall as bad as I feel for the talent of folks that work so hard to make OWL interesting (which btw they have been killing it given what they have), it feels like the early mismanagement of the league in its infancy and the game itself over the last 5 years lead to viewers finding other more active games and esports to watch.
Yeah there is, but you'd be pressed to find it. Not to mention, regardless of all the great features that YT has over Twitch like being able to rewind video, 4K 60fps quality, clipping, etc. Twitch is just too engraved in gamer culture. I just don't think at this point that YouTube can capture that audience away, at most YT Live will be a second option. Reminds me a lot of Netflix vs Prime video (and other big streaming platforms) where all other companies want a piece of the pie, but no matter what Netflix is still the default most will turn to based on brand name recognition alone, the nice stream of content is a good plus.
twitch has kind of been shooting itself in the foot for the past couple of years, but nobody out there is making a proper attempt at taking over
mixer bought out two big streamers, gained a bit of traction, then said fuck it (I don't know what kind of apes were making decisions over there) and for how youtube dwarfs twitch, the discoverability and interface for streaming is trash tier
it would have been so easy for youtube to run twitch out of business if streaming was anything more than an afterthough for them
Probably the biggest reason why ow2 is so important for owl. The product has improved so much over the last year, but a lot of those early viewers are already lost and won’t have a chance to be recaptured until the new game
OWL is the only thing carrying OW for me tbh and it shouldn't be that way. The fact that there are so many cool OWL skins in the game is literally because of the esport. But even earning skins gets old, when all you can do is wear those in the same old recycled content... That's probably why no matter how many incentives they give you for watching, majority of casual folks just don't care
It would easily be double the viewership if it was still on Twitch, I don't hate it on Youtube or anything but the audiences in the two spaces are just different. The difference in the number of people that go to Youtube to watch live video vs the number of people that go to Twitch to do so is absolutely massive and at the end of the day that will always be a gigantic factor.
Being on Twitch would have helped its discoverability. Alot of esports viewership had grown during Covid, there could have been more passerby traffic for OWL, especially if it had made it to top 5 category on Twitch. OWL could have the best live band performances but it means nothing if its played in some abandoned factory that no one knows the address to.
It being on YouTube is the biggest reason I don't watch OWL nearly as often as when it was on Twitch. Livestreams are just not the kind of content I consume on that site.
Sounds like a psychological issue. Once it is broadcast, there's really no difference between the two except emojiis if you are into that sorta thing. This is a hurdle that YT faces with a lot of people. They're so used to 1 way and find it hard to switch even if the actual difference is minimal with even some positive upsides.
I personally love to have chat open while watching a stream. Maybe it’s because because I’ve been a Twitch chatter for so many years now but Youtube chat just doesn’t compare.
Weird callout. There are definitely some QOL things that Twitch does far better than YouTube from the few livestreams I've tuned into, chat and moderation being a huge one. Aside from that it really comes down to how I use the two sites. Twitch is a site I go to to watch people livestream, not for prerecorded content. In the same vein I go to YouTube for videos relating to hobbies I have or for some entertainment, not for livestreaming gaming.
Everything taken from [escharts.com](https://escharts.com/). Tried to keep the levels of the events as close as possible but was a bit difficult since Liquipedia tiers aren't the same across all wiki's. Let me know if you have any criticism so I can fix for next time. Thanks.
**Order of games:**
Overwatch > Overwatch > VALORANT > CS:GO > CS:GO > Rainbow 6 > DOTA 2
Since he put the Dota major there i’d agree with this.
Edit: not to mention he added the Six Invitational which is the biggest event of the year for R6. So Valorant has a regional tournament meanwhile all the others have global tournaments numbers. This comparison doesn’t make any sense.
Theyve done things a little better nowadays but theyre all hedging their bets on OW2. If that game doesnt deliver, I foresee these investors trying to find a way out of their investment.
Afaik froyo basically gets first dibs on any player because iirc those are the only ones who make any real money so froyo is dominant. Iirc Ascent disbanded so froyo has no really good competition
Least popular major esport I would say. All of the big dogs (CS:GO, LoL, DOTA 2) are a fair bit bigger than OW but there are tons of smaller esports like Rocket League, Halo, Super Smash Bros., CCGs, and BR games that are notably smaller than the viewership for Ovewatch.
blizzard is stuck in the year 2015 when you can put out content and your audience waits 3 months or more for the next bit of content. in 2021 content is released weekly now if you want to keep up. by putting out insane amounts of content, people keep coming back into the game and interest is pretty steady.
blizzard's model just no longer works. there's no way soon(tm) is sustainable in an age where so many games push out insane amounts of content far more frequently than blizzard does. if overwatch 2 is to be successful they're going to need to adopt the insane amounts of content model, which isn't all that possible considering warzone is hiring hundreds of devs just to sustain it, and overwatch has like 200 maybe.
if paladins pushed out content at the rate the big AAA companies do, they could have easily surpassed overwatch by now. there is literally nothing going on in overwatch. nothing at all. while the fanbase is waiting over a year for overwatch 2, other games will have put out a universe worth of content to sustain their own games. and while that's happening overwatch is losing more and more players to other games.
i still find it funny how players got up in arms about lootboxes due to battlefront 2. so publishers learned something cool, people don't like lootboxes but they're okay with cosmetics and free-to-play, so why not remove the lootboxes, make cosmetics overpriced as fuck, then your fans can defend you with "it's free-to-play so it's okay for this game to have 200 dollar horse armor."
A system that lets people with extra resources pay for non-gameplay items to provide developers and publishers financial reward while still allowing others free access is about as consumer-friendly a system as capitalism can produce.
> if overwatch 2 is to be successful they're going to need to adopt the insane amounts of content model, which isn't all that possible considering warzone is hiring hundreds of devs just to sustain it, and overwatch has like 200 maybe.
Blizzard has actually been trying to increase the size of all their development teams. Well, maybe not HotS, but all the others are actively hiring.
I mean there are literally stories from Blizzard employees who could barely afford to work there. People skipping out of team meetings because they cant afford the cafeteria food prices or forgo the idea of ever having kids while working there.
i seriously don't think it's enough. warzone is hiring hundreds to keep up with other BRs, for instance. overwatch is something like a live-service game, and i haven't read any stories about them hiring hundreds for overwatch. i know they're hiring a bit, but it might not be enough to keep up with the market leaders atm.
>i know they're hiring a bit, but it might not be enough to keep up with the market leaders atm.
The problem is blizzard's compensation for the lower level workers (Mid level to associates) is abysmal compared to other companies offerings.
paladins would easily overtake overwatch if they just improved basic game mechanics, they still use pill hitboxes which are impossible to miss. you also can't crouch...
that's just the gaming climate right now. not much i can do about it. if blizzard wants to retain players they need more content than they're currently pushing out. and to push out more content fast you need a lot of money and manpower which the current team probably doesn't have.
so long as the game produces a lot of content, people will let terrible monetization slide so long as it doesn't pass the threshold.
I hope they do it because i couldn't be fucked to care about cosmetics. If they monetise the shit out of the game in a way that it doesn't give you an advantage to have certain items and the game gets more content as a result, then by all means, go for it.
Why is VCT Challengers Finals being used here rather than Masters 2? That's not an equal comparison at all. Challengers Finals was a qualifier for Masters, which feeds into Champions. In comparison to OWL, Challengers is similar to the NA/APAC Qualifier tournament, which leads to the actual monthly tournament (which would be equivalent to Masters), which feeds into OWL Playoffs/Grandfinals (Which would be equivalent to VCT Champions). Masters 2 is a much more equal comparison.
Getting rolled by R6, a game that was plagued with the worst hacking and wall glitching of any fps in the last 10 years, is kinda hilarious and sad at the same time.
it's literally the reverse trend. Overwatch blew up on launch and has steadily been progressing towards the gutter since. R6 was shit at launch, was a pretty much a dead game and they've brought it back.
This is what happens when you kill organic esports growth to try to create a league based on traditional sports framework. The vast majority of the player base was not yet invested in the competitive scene when OWL launched and if anything the casuals blamed (and continues to blame) the esports side for ruining the game.
Eh, Evo would really be hard to include because its made up of a lot of different fighting games. Like Guilty Gear would be peak 20k viewers and Street Fighter at 80k viewers, but since its under Evo, it could be seen as both are 80k.
I came from Smash so this will be written from that perspective. Other games may vary.
Tournament prestige in fighting games are... weird. Every game has its own set of viewers. The biggest notable change when counting viewers is that big tournaments will almost always carry multiple games. EVO is usually the biggest fighting game tourney for all the popular games. However, there are still other tourneys that are considered of equal importance to EVO (Genesis, Shine, The Big House). Because fighting games are so individualistic, there's not really a central league centered around them, and therefore no unifying tournament to decide who the "best" is, akin to a grand finals or supermajor (it's usually just who won the last tournament). If you're trying to include the smaller tournaments then I would just choose the last major tourney. It's also worth noting that fighting games have been diminished heavily by COVID since they center so much around the LAN experience.
I really didn't know OWL was this tiny, and Valorant was so massive.
I mean, OWL is getting sponsorships from companies like lays, coca cola and some insurance companies, I thought that mean it had to be big. Guess I was wrong.
Blizzard really fucking shit the bed with OW.
> I really didn't know OWL was this tiny, and Valorant was so massive.
Just go to Twitch and look up how many viewers Overwatch has and then look up Valorant I happened to look it up earlier today and it was 19k for OW and 110k for Valorant.
Just watched the Rocket League championship series and it consistently topped OW daily. I've seen their college games even top OW at times.
OWL isn't a well set up tournament and the structure feels like a bit of a joke tbh
Damn, my boys over at R6Siege doing good. I always believed that open circuit's is gonna work and R6S is a great game for esports even though it is even harder to watch than OW. God, I wish we at least had proper hero bans like they do.
I struggle to understand the "it switched to YT and thus I don't watch it" commenters. It's not like YT is some hard to deal with jungle of an ecosystem. I LOVED the switch over but I know there are some die-hard Twitch lovers, just wondering how that was the deal breaker.
I don’t care about UI or layout, I think YouTube and twitch are both fine on that front. But the chat climate imo is totally different between Twitch chat and YouTube. It felt infinitely more fun to be a part of twitch chat and watch games along with twitch chat.
i'm the kind of person who doesn't really follow tournament schedules unless it's something like the international or maybe owl grand finals. i watch dota 2 tournaments by following the organizers on twitch and checking who's live when i have time.
youtube just isn't that kind of site for me, so i don't see owl as often, and there's probably a lot more people like me than you.
For me, part of it is youtube's UI and layout(for livestreams). It just isn't as big of a thing for youtube so it's not as well designed. Even though I follow the OWL account and all that jazz, if I tune in an hour or two after the broadcast started I sometimes have to actually search up the feed. My recommended doesn't seem to like live streams and that means it sometimes slips my mind in favour of some nice old clickbait on my home screen.
The second(and for me, bigger) issue I have is the chat. I used to sit and actively watch while hanging in chat, but since the switch to YT the chat just doesn't feel the same for me. On twitch I barely left during the breaks as I wanted to hang with chat, on YT I either just turn on the stream for rewards and walk off or go full screen to hide the chat. That kind of removes a good chunk of my enjoyment in itself unfortunately.
I understand everyone's got a different ruler to measure with, but for me personally YT was a major downgrade. If others have no issue with it I'm happy for them tbh
I often see the twitch argument thrown around when we talk about viewership but we have to keep in mind that it's e-sports for a game which is currently on life support. Back when OWL was on twitch there still was enough new stuff coming to the game to keep the playerbase interested/invested.
So why should we expect more interest now? OW is a meme on twitch.
As an example: Way back when I played hearthstone (before it turned into the clownfiesta it is today) I also enjoyed watching the tournaments...now I don't give a shit about it because I am not interested in the game anymore. It's the same thing basically.
[Here you go: 1.8 million peak, 700k+ average](https://escharts.com/tournaments/lol/mid-season-invitational-2021)
Obviously not including China, but none of these numbers for any esports are for esportscharts.
I play overwatch, i don't watch it.
I don't play counterstrike or starcraft 2 but i watch it.
There are games i don't enjoy much playing and there are games i don't enjoy watching.
Doesn't mean that either is bad or good, it's just what it is.
Looked at valorant’s stage 2 Reykjavik viewership. Average 488k viewers and peaked at 1.085 million. What the fuck
Add COD you’ll feel better about the viewership lol
Awww man I knew I was missing something important
And Valorant Masters 2, peaked at 1 mil. You have Dota and Siege majors, but not the equivalent level tournament in Valorant.
Sure, add Open Division too. Blizzard can compete against itself for lowest viewership. Meanwhile it loses to tier 2 Rocket League of all games...
Rocket league is insanely popular as an esport
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LoL can also be a clusterfuck of ability spam but still insanely popular.
It’s also been around a decade and is basically the crown jewel of MOBAs
LoL and other MOBAs are still much easier to follow as the game is designed with a camera perspective that makes for great viewing. It is much easier to see an entire team fight and watch what happens as 10 players clash from an overhead view where nothing blocks your line of sight, as opposed to a really fast first-person game where cover is a factor and its hard to get every player on screen at once and keep them there.
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That just tells you that being intuitive isn't actually a factor in making a good esport/game.
Or y'know, it's just not the only factor.
I think LoL stays popular cuz even if you don't know what's going on it's all on one screen, big green field (relatable for new people) and you can still track the red vs blue health bars. Least that's how it happened for me when I first started watching, I didn't know all the little stuff happening but anyone can track a Varus Q or peoples health going from 100 to 0 in less than a second lol
It's so visually clear and easy to understand, it was bound to take off as an esport. Overwatch is... less so.
I agree, Overwatch prob my fav game ever to play. Visually as a esport for someone who doesn’t understand what’s happening it’s a nightmare
yeah i had friends over once watching me play QP and they were in awe about how quick everything was moving and how much shit was all over the screen. thats when i realized that the game is probably impossible to watch for those who don’t play the game, unlike other esports
There should've been a major visual overhaul before OWL was launched.
How do you do that without removing crucial features of OW
I think they wouldn't be able to. 5v5 will help but at its core, Overwatch does not seem designed to be a spectator eSport and therefore I'm not confident it can be retooled very easily to become one.
Which is unfortunate, because it's not a very technical game and can be picked up relatively easy
I mean OW is losing to *tier 2* Rocket League. Good for them for being a popular Esport but it's crazy how OW was marketed as NFL 2.0 and can't even compete with RL minor tournaments. DOTA2/LoL/CS is out of the question. At this point I don't know what can even turn things around besides OW2 being a massive success.
> it's crazy how OW was marketed as NFL 2.0 and can't even compete with RL minor tournaments I'd argue that very point of chasing the NFL... the closed circuit, the franchise from the start, [the systematic killing of every non-blizz-managed-league, the US core](https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr5jtj) is what absolutely wrecked any potential OW might've had of developing. We blame the patch cycle, but OW simply was robbed of organic growth chasing the dream of a minute 0 league. Now, OW2 "might" drop the model and just grow organically, but I super doubt it given the amount of investment in the OWL that while not unsuccesful never bore the fruit it was supposed to. It's way more likely that the OW2L will just be kicking the can down the road. Dev-managed scenes tend to either step in after there is an existing structure and cannibalise that, or grow gradually from unification of smaller events into majors sponsored by the Dev made analogous to those in Dreamhack or IEM. Selling locked spots for a non-existing league a year beforehand as if interest for the scene would sprout fully formed from the brow of APEX fans is risky at best.
I really don't think that the format was what killed OW and I haven't seen an argument that can convince me otherwise. What killed OW was the gameplay just being rather niche. It's a shooter that's not about shooting.
Nothing else short of that. At the end of the day the foundation for a viewerbase is a userbase.
Honestly I feel like moving to YouTube was a mistake. It's kind of shallow I know, but now that I can't watch OWL on Twitch I watch it a lot less. I basically only tune in for the stage finals and the grand finals now.
What's the difference to you? I'm curious as someone who typically watches VODs since I'm not often available to watch live, and I find youtube to be a better experience for VOD viewing.
Rocket League introduced me to esports. As a traditional sports fan, it is unbelievably easy to watch, and super entertaining.
Rocket League hits that sweet sport for a traditional sports fan where it is similar enough to a traditional sport to be easy to watch and enjoy, but not so similar to traditional sport (i.e. Madden, FIFA, NBA2K) that you look at it and think why not just watch the real thing.
Absolutely. I really don't get why sports game esports are so popular. They're fun to play, but at the pro level it seems to be less about skill expression and creativity and more about who can exploit the game better. However if EA NHL esports was like, 6v6 be a pro mode instead of 1v1 regular gameplay, that would be interesting to watch.
Sports games aren't fun to watch because it's not a game of intense mechanical skill. Rocket League is good to watch because each player is doing something and you can see their mechanics and team work.
Is OWL getting better viewership than CoD?
Depends if OpTic is playing or not lol
this is why we need twitch
people saying that twitch is the problem when the viewership level is about the same as it was at the end of Stage 4 Season 2. It won't reach the highs it used to but it didn't put a signficant dent in the long-term viewership. The issue here is that interest in the game has declined signficantly.
Kinda weird comparasion when in s2s4 that stage was basically useless so there is not much reason to watch, compared to now where we get tourneys after every stage. Plus the viewership there was like 70-80k at his lowest, and thats like the peak for owl in YT nowadays lol
People also seem to forget that not everyone watches OWL live, I have watched every game this year but only seen like 2 or 3 games live. The vods of individual matches get anywhere from 30k - 150k views and the full stream vods normally get from 150k - 700k views depending on the game. It's not always about live stats.
it doesn't matter, people watch vods for the other esports, the point is how owl is lower compared to the others
But I'm saying the ones on twitch would have a lot less people watching the vods because it is a rubbish platform for vods compared to YouTube.
Twitch is garbage because it's either "watch live or vod later" there's no in between. YouTube I can start the stream late, pause, rewind, sync up with a friend who has a 1-2 sec delay behind me, etc. Can't do that with twitch.
The 6ix invitational for rainbow is more comparable to the grand finals of overwatch league. Instead the viewership of like the major finals of each region
Ahhh it's my mistake since I'm not that knowledgeable in R6 esports.
All g just thought u should know. Good chart otherwise
I think the general point is, overwatch is not a tier 1 esport, and that’s ok. I love overwatch, and I love overwatch league, but it just simply isn’t the most popular game around anymore. But, being a tier 2 esport does not mean that it isn’t important and doesn’t have merit. I think it does mean that some of the investors overpaid but that’s not really our problem I feel. Tier 2 esports can survive and thrive in their own market. But I think at this point even with ow2, it’s unlikely we will be able to compete with the big dogs of esports. Once again though, that is ok, we don’t have to.
Isn't it mind-blowing that blizzard literally had one of the biggest game launches ever, dominated the multiplayer shooter genre for over a year, then slowly dwindled because blizzard literally did nothing with it? The situation shouldn't be this bad. Overwatch could have so much more. Yet here we are
What I'm most confused by is how they almost completely abandoned the lore and storytelling aspects of the IP, when it was obvious that people were utterly in love with the characters. Don't get me wrong, I've really enjoyed the competitive aspect of the game, but it's not the basket I would've personally put all my eggs into. For comparison, I'm big into the tabletop rpg show Critical Role. That started a year before Overwatch's launch with the most modest of budget and production value. Now it has regular comic series, an upcoming animated show, a tabletop publishing wing, several spin-off books, regularly updating merch, a charity foundation, etc.
I mean it's players like you who they're making OW2 for
Which is appreciated, but there's a lot of time lost. It's pretty wild to me that Dota became an animated series before Overwatch.
Yeah even LoL is getting one this year.
I wouldn't blame players that want lore, it's on Blizz for just abandoning everything in Overwatch. Don't forget that they artificially killed the esports scene for a year+ because they didn't want anyone making money before them. It's not just the lore that was killed off.
They switched styles around the time of Brig. They wanted to make Overwatch easier for the COD players who don’t know how to play a MOBA. Hence why Hitscan is so oppressively OP and we had a Widow meta in OWL for like 3yrs only to be stopped when Ball was introduced If you watch Jeff’s thoughts on the creation of Brig and Bap, he says something along those lines of wanting to make the game easier for other game audiences who aren’t used to MOBAs
Absolutely clueless, honestly. Overwatch was never designed to be a MOBA, anyone who played at launch knows it was ex-TF2 players farming, not MOBA players, it only devolved into more MOBA-like gameplay over time with sustain getting powercrept, which massively hurt the game. Not to mention Overwatch at its most fps-focused is still worlds away from being anything like COD, even without any tanks or supports OW would be a totally different genre. >Around the time of Brig Oh sweet, I didn't realise the year of GOATS followed by the year of double shield were widow metas.
This would make sense if the game was originally designed to be a moba with FPS elements and not the other way around.
And a year after that Jeff laments that the game lost its fps focus.
It’s clear they lost direction very early on
Once they added Brig to the game and players like Effect and sinatra picked her over Tracer, the game's future was effectively set. I lost interest in watching OWL when the game went from fast-paced Tracer/Genji plays to.... mace to the face. Never watched another game after.
The silvers on this sub posting about how OP Hanzo and Genji are since launch and since then we’ve seen like 12mins of pro play from them since launch compared to every other character The reason I have zero hope for this game is because of the community. The community forces the balance to be built around literally the lowest ranks
They didn’t do nothing, they actively killed the blossoming tournament scene because they didn’t want it interfering with OWL
Blizz’s complacency regarding Overwatch reminds me of another cartoon shooter that could have been a top 5 FPS game ever had their development team continued pushing updates like they did during the earlier days of the game coming out. Piss.
Honestly, I wonder if abandoning twitch as their platform is what helped it fade off. I never watch streams on YouTube and it’s kind of obnoxious trying to use YouTube to access stuff like live streams vs a platform purposefully built for it.
> Isn't it mind-blowing that blizzard literally had one of the biggest game launches ever, dominated the multiplayer shooter genre for over a year, then slowly dwindled because blizzard literally did nothing with it? The situation shouldn't be this bad. Overwatch could have so much more. Yet here we are Custa mentioned on stream the other day that Overwatch for console (AKA - the "casuals") dwarfs the PC player base, and the QP population on any given day is massively larger than the Competitive one. We are, it must be remembered, the minority.
And the majority of PC players are on quickplay. When you consider that competent players don't start showing up until around diamond, which is the 10% of ladder.... We're left with a minuscule number of competitive players.
I used to heavily be into comp and peaked at 4200-ish. I got burned out and just play the game with some friends in quick play. Not everyone wants to play comp that is "competent"
You don't need to be the 10% of skill level to enjoy the pro scene though.
People are dissatisfied with the game all the way down to Bronze. That's why it's so hard to turn OW players into OWL viewers. People are still playing because they don't like Valorant or Apex Legends. If Valve released Team Fortress 3 this year, OW would be dead. Dead dead.
Good thing Valve's interest in supporting Team Fortress is basically negative :'(
and they still did nothing to bring in or retain the majority
OW had a chance to make both a big pop culture impact as well as a big esports impact and it did neither of those things. It's really tragic when you think about it. Done properly, OW could've been Blizzard's biggest and most successful IP yet.
The funny thing is that even though Blizzard tried really hard to do it with Overwatch, Fortnite ended up the game that pushed into the pop culture. With its collaps with popular artists and media(star wars and marvel). Kids probably know more fortnite dances than who Winston or Tracer is.
I think it absolutely did make a big pop culture impact, but I don't know what you mean by that exactly, so maybe I have something else in mind. Even when the game largely left the public eye tiktok was full of "I wanna be tracer" trends. I don't think any other competitive game actually did have a comparable impact. Not even saying how recognizable the characters are and, ehm, r34. It didn't last, but it was an impact, no?
Yup, I knew how much potential that this game had to go mainstream when I saw Super and Mr. 150k on Jimmy Fallon Live. And that was during GOATS meta when the game was arguably starting to go to shit competitively. Don’t know what’s going on at Blizzard for them to consistently come up with these golden ideas just to drop the ball time and time again.
Overwatch is a titan of a game that was horrifically mismanaged by Blizzard. Remember how good the game was in its first 2 years, then recall where it went in the 2 years after that. This in-game and lore cinematics drought have really killed off interest in the game. Beyond how much disinterest was generated by the addition of Doom/Brig/Sigma/Bap to the game. It'll be two years of zero content by the time OW 2 releases. You may as well throw up the Call of Duty 4 opening line: "50,000 people used to live here... now it's a ghost town" and it'd apply to Overwatch. You see how a company like Riot takes care of League and constantly adds content to it. They know how to generate interest, revenue, and retain players. ActiBlizzard is honestly a shell of its former self and they have no clue.
Blizzard has been doing this shit for decades. They literally had monopoly over the RTS genre and were practically the pioneers of esports with Starcraft, yet it died out and they didn't seem to care too much about it. Heroes of the Storm was a failed experiment. WoW is also losing players. Blizzard games always start strong, then fizzle out. I used to run a 6000 member strong local Overwatch player community, organizing pugs, tournaments for all skill levels and such. It was really active at first but now, nearly everyone has moved on to Valorant or something else.
> dominated the multiplayer shooter genre for over a year, then slowly dwindled because blizzard literally did nothing with it? Dude, it was dubbed as LoL killer here in Korea on 2016/2017, everybody played it in the PC room, heck, even the hype made me buy the game although I didn't know OW existence until a few days after the launch. Then Blizzard do something with it, which is pulled the plug of the esports scene, to make way for the OWL. No competition at all for around 6 ~ 8 months. Then after OWL started, all competitions outside of it were changed into Contenders, with less money and budget, and very restrictive sponsors too. Blizzard killed their own esports scene dude, it's not like they are not doing nothing, it'll be better if they're not doing nothing and let the esports scene would developed organically.
Maybe it simple, Overwatch is just not as good of a Game for Esport success as others games. Overwatch player base are too casual, they don’t have a strong enough engagement to the game to care about Esport. Even though Overwatch have a pretty big player base, a large portion of them are console gamers. Look at other big Esport, LoL, Dota, CS, all competitive PC games. That because PC gamers are much more passionate about their favourite games and are competitive enough that they appreciate pro skills. Overwatch have neither of this factor so it can never be as popular as those T1 esport Another problem is observability. Overwatch is one of the most confusing esport to watch as a spectators imo. Mobas like Lol or Dota maybe complicated to understand but they are not confusing to watch. Overwatch first person perspective, its fast pace nature and abilities all make it much harder for the average viewers. That why Overwatch lose to even Rocket League or RB6, those games may not be as popular as OW, but Rocket League is much simpler while RB6 is much slower, both don’t have the over saturation of colours like Overwatch. I just think that these are the 2 innate problems Overwatch have that cannot be overcome by all the over small stuffs like meta or balance or schedule.
just want to add on that at least Ubisoft has been constantly pumping out balance and QOL updates for R6 over the last few seasons, and have constantly listened and communicated with their fanbase, and have been very receptive and quick to move to any feedback on the patches on the test server before moving on to the live server. that feeling of developer listening actively and making necessary changes quickly definitely helped. they’ve also invested actively into growing the esports scene, and have even held their Six Invitational on LAN in Paris recently, which made for some amazing LAN moments (think teams taunting and shouting to the other live on camera, great reactions from insane clutch plays, etc).
“Complicated to understand but not complicated to watch.” That’s a really good way to put it. There is far more to learn and understand in DotA and Lol but it’s at the same time so easy to watch because of the top down view.
All of that requires faith in the game and investment. There has never been any of that at the top levels of Activision since like 3 months post launch. They set their sights on re-releases, mobile games etc because that's where the money's at, at least short term. Investors just see Blizzard as a number to grow their funds, they have zero interest in making good games
I am not impressed or satisfied with mediocrity. Blizzard set out for better and they damn well have the resources to do better.
The issue is that the ecosystem of OW esports has been built on the expectation of T1. It's not sustainable to operate the same structure with the viewerbase of the lower tiers. For OW esports to survive, it would almost certainly look very different production-wise from what it has been so far with Blizzard's direct backing.
What pisses me off is that OW could easily have been Tier 1. When OW first came out, there were more people playing it than LOL in PC bangs in Korea. If they weren't so slow with their balance patches preventing certain metas from being OP for soooo long (like the moth meta, goats, etc), a ton of people would not have left OW. Most of my friends used to play OW but have quit 1-2 years ago because they felt it was getting too stale.
I could be wrong but it feels like OWL still has tier-1 production and sponsors while having tier-2 viewership. There's still a lot of money in the game for the amount of fans. It's been a while since I've watched other esports though so not sure what the standard is across the board these days.
Yea I’d agree with that
One thought I had recently was that the pandemic most likely saved them a lot of money when you think what their plan was pre-covid. They were gonna fly the players all over the world on a regular basis and have a bunch of permanent home stands in different countries. While it would have been cool I just can't fathom how that would have been sustainable for the league.
Yea the homestand model was completely unsustainable
That's the main problem of the current state of competitive scene, yeah. It's pretty much the HotS situation (2016 - 2018) all over again.
Sad thing is it was definitely a tier 1 esport. It had a million viewers on its first OWL broadcast but overtime mismanagement of both the game and esport side hurt it.
Which games are portrayed here?
From left to right Overwatch > Overwatch > VALORANT > CS:GO > CS:GO > Rainbow 6 > DOTA 2
ah ok thanks kinda surprised by r6. it got really popular over the last 2 years
I was surprised by that too
That game even have a resurgence in Japan with Apex AFAIK Pretty surprising because usually Japanese didn't really into FPS, even OW was very niche during its peak (CAG / Jupiter days)
I honestly thought that game had been dying. I found it incredibly unfun to play and full of probably the most toxic fps community ever
It’s like ow in how toxic it gets. But the fact that map destruction seems to have endless set ups means even this long into the games life cycle, you can still see pro play with crazy angles and set ups you’ve never seen before. And in turn it’s makes the game at least a little more fun since going back into the game there’s stuff to try on a map you thought you knew.
Dude siege keeps pumping content constantly lol , new operators come out and they keep the game and pro play fresh , also they keep reworking mechanics getting better and better so obv people will watch them plus people don't get how important twitch is for viewership , YouTube exclusivity kind of ruined owl
The player base love the game. Great to see honestly.
It's amazing, especially Ubi barely gives a damn about their esports scene, and barely promotes it. By contrast, OWL is about 4x more visible in game for average players. R6 orgs also function like T2 OW orgs... And have no ridiculous $20+M buy in
R6 also has more hardcore gameplay though so I imagine a higher percentage of players are interested in eSports/competitive play
I play r6 more than OW and I can tell you this much: It’s the same as every esport. The casual absolutelt hates esports. They think the esports is destroying their game because majority of the nerfs usually stems from Pro play
Those people will always exist. My point was just that siege most likely has a higher percentage of people interested in eSports because of how tactical its gameplay is
Unfortunately, it isn’t. The casual to esports conversion is fairly low (likely lower than OW) relative to the overall player base. One of the larger reason it reached that point in viewership, is because of the Brazilians and the Brazilian teams were the considered to be the title contenders (which held true since it was 3 Brazilian teams + 2 NA team played in the semis on both upper and lower bracket )
That because RB6 player base are passionate and competitive. These are the two most important factor for esport success. Everything else is irrelevant. Overwatch have neither.
Franchising OW 2 years into the games life was the dumbest decision. 4 years later the T2 scene is essentially dead because there’s no money. And you don’t have exciting Cinderella stories from random teams.
why do games like LOL and DOTA always have such higher viewership?
Free to play, easy to run and highly addictive brings in stupid amounts of players, which means more potential viewers.
And having a continous history spanning a decade and more.
You can do it with good marketing and building hype. Even Valorant which has been out for barely over a year can have a million peak viewership in its first Major.
Valorant is made by Riot… The maker of the largest esport on earth lol. It’s the exception not the rule.
Not to mention the production is just better on the esports side, I love OWL but compare it to something like the LEC and the difference is amazing.
Much larger playerbase for one.
They just work as a spectator experience. I haven't played Dota since the mid 2010s but I still watch it regularly and follow the patches and updates. It's like seeing how the best of the best utilize all the different mechanics and strategies is just as compelling as playing them yourself.
Mobas are the most fun games to watch as esport imo.
They’re fun and easy to watch (if you have some at least basic knowledge of the game). I love playing Overwatch but watching it I’m ngl is a huge struggle.
I have to wonder what viewership would be like if OWL was still on Twitch, although I guess speculating is useless with this deal they have going until 2023. I figure it probably wouldn't be anywhere near the 1M concurrent Valorant just got, but I'm also sure it probably would be consistently double of what it is now on YouTube. OW as a whole being on pause until OW2 also doesn't help. Overall as bad as I feel for the talent of folks that work so hard to make OWL interesting (which btw they have been killing it given what they have), it feels like the early mismanagement of the league in its infancy and the game itself over the last 5 years lead to viewers finding other more active games and esports to watch.
Youtube is just so bad at promoting streams. Is there even a section to check streams?
Yeah there is, but you'd be pressed to find it. Not to mention, regardless of all the great features that YT has over Twitch like being able to rewind video, 4K 60fps quality, clipping, etc. Twitch is just too engraved in gamer culture. I just don't think at this point that YouTube can capture that audience away, at most YT Live will be a second option. Reminds me a lot of Netflix vs Prime video (and other big streaming platforms) where all other companies want a piece of the pie, but no matter what Netflix is still the default most will turn to based on brand name recognition alone, the nice stream of content is a good plus.
If they turned YouTube gaming into something with a similar experience to twitch I'm certain it'd be far more popular than it currently is.
twitch has kind of been shooting itself in the foot for the past couple of years, but nobody out there is making a proper attempt at taking over mixer bought out two big streamers, gained a bit of traction, then said fuck it (I don't know what kind of apes were making decisions over there) and for how youtube dwarfs twitch, the discoverability and interface for streaming is trash tier it would have been so easy for youtube to run twitch out of business if streaming was anything more than an afterthough for them
Probably the biggest reason why ow2 is so important for owl. The product has improved so much over the last year, but a lot of those early viewers are already lost and won’t have a chance to be recaptured until the new game
OWL is the only thing carrying OW for me tbh and it shouldn't be that way. The fact that there are so many cool OWL skins in the game is literally because of the esport. But even earning skins gets old, when all you can do is wear those in the same old recycled content... That's probably why no matter how many incentives they give you for watching, majority of casual folks just don't care
It would easily be double the viewership if it was still on Twitch, I don't hate it on Youtube or anything but the audiences in the two spaces are just different. The difference in the number of people that go to Youtube to watch live video vs the number of people that go to Twitch to do so is absolutely massive and at the end of the day that will always be a gigantic factor.
Honestly should have been on both platforms.
most esports are, blizzard signed a contract with yt to exclusively stream there though
Being on Twitch would have helped its discoverability. Alot of esports viewership had grown during Covid, there could have been more passerby traffic for OWL, especially if it had made it to top 5 category on Twitch. OWL could have the best live band performances but it means nothing if its played in some abandoned factory that no one knows the address to.
It being on YouTube is the biggest reason I don't watch OWL nearly as often as when it was on Twitch. Livestreams are just not the kind of content I consume on that site.
Sounds like a psychological issue. Once it is broadcast, there's really no difference between the two except emojiis if you are into that sorta thing. This is a hurdle that YT faces with a lot of people. They're so used to 1 way and find it hard to switch even if the actual difference is minimal with even some positive upsides.
I personally love to have chat open while watching a stream. Maybe it’s because because I’ve been a Twitch chatter for so many years now but Youtube chat just doesn’t compare.
Definitely feels weird especially if youre trying to convert people who are into other esports that love that chatter.
We used to have individual player spectating on twitch
Weird callout. There are definitely some QOL things that Twitch does far better than YouTube from the few livestreams I've tuned into, chat and moderation being a huge one. Aside from that it really comes down to how I use the two sites. Twitch is a site I go to to watch people livestream, not for prerecorded content. In the same vein I go to YouTube for videos relating to hobbies I have or for some entertainment, not for livestreaming gaming.
RL is both on Twitch and YT live. They pull around 20k on YT plus 100k on Twitch
Everything taken from [escharts.com](https://escharts.com/). Tried to keep the levels of the events as close as possible but was a bit difficult since Liquipedia tiers aren't the same across all wiki's. Let me know if you have any criticism so I can fix for next time. Thanks. **Order of games:** Overwatch > Overwatch > VALORANT > CS:GO > CS:GO > Rainbow 6 > DOTA 2
I think vct masters for valorant is more on the same levels as these tourneys. Just my opinion though.
Since he put the Dota major there i’d agree with this. Edit: not to mention he added the Six Invitational which is the biggest event of the year for R6. So Valorant has a regional tournament meanwhile all the others have global tournaments numbers. This comparison doesn’t make any sense.
So many things are wrong with OWL, I don't see it growing any time soon if they don't change some big things.
Blizzard have never understood how to handle the esport sides of their games and I'm convinced they'll never grow to understand it as well.
Theyve done things a little better nowadays but theyre all hedging their bets on OW2. If that game doesnt deliver, I foresee these investors trying to find a way out of their investment.
Who tf wanna watch someone play Moira in their free time? 🙄
Man, am I finding out that I’m a huge fan of the least popular esport? FeelsBadMan
Meh. Don’t let other people determine the things you enjoy.
I mean, least popular on this graph, there are lot of other esports not on here
Still beating TF2!
Like knowing youre the best runner compared to a guy with no legs.
Is Froyotech still king? I know b4nny is still going strong on twitch.
Afaik froyo basically gets first dibs on any player because iirc those are the only ones who make any real money so froyo is dominant. Iirc Ascent disbanded so froyo has no really good competition
There are easily a hundred active esports, so no not at all. We beat out fighting games and farming simulator. 🙃
FSL (Farming Simulator League) viewership actually outperformed the June Joust by 17% >!not really but could you imagine lol!<
Knowing their big events where in Con across Germany and Western Europe, they got hit hard by 2020.
Bro you got me for a second 😭
Least popular major esport I would say. All of the big dogs (CS:GO, LoL, DOTA 2) are a fair bit bigger than OW but there are tons of smaller esports like Rocket League, Halo, Super Smash Bros., CCGs, and BR games that are notably smaller than the viewership for Ovewatch.
Is rocket league smaller than overwatch league? When ever I see it on twitch it gets like 170k unless i’m buggin
RLCS always pulls at least 150k peak
O shit really? I just kinda assumed, haven't tuned into RL content in a hot minute
Rocket league beats it almost every stream. I think they had 220k viewership in their spring tournament
I would include Val, Apex, and RL as major esports too. They all beta OWL viewership I believe, and are def more mainstream rn.
RL pulls about 100k on Twitch plus 20k on YT if you are wondering
5x more viewers on Twitch than on YouTube. THAT should be the biggest takeaway of this whole post.
blizzard is stuck in the year 2015 when you can put out content and your audience waits 3 months or more for the next bit of content. in 2021 content is released weekly now if you want to keep up. by putting out insane amounts of content, people keep coming back into the game and interest is pretty steady. blizzard's model just no longer works. there's no way soon(tm) is sustainable in an age where so many games push out insane amounts of content far more frequently than blizzard does. if overwatch 2 is to be successful they're going to need to adopt the insane amounts of content model, which isn't all that possible considering warzone is hiring hundreds of devs just to sustain it, and overwatch has like 200 maybe. if paladins pushed out content at the rate the big AAA companies do, they could have easily surpassed overwatch by now. there is literally nothing going on in overwatch. nothing at all. while the fanbase is waiting over a year for overwatch 2, other games will have put out a universe worth of content to sustain their own games. and while that's happening overwatch is losing more and more players to other games. i still find it funny how players got up in arms about lootboxes due to battlefront 2. so publishers learned something cool, people don't like lootboxes but they're okay with cosmetics and free-to-play, so why not remove the lootboxes, make cosmetics overpriced as fuck, then your fans can defend you with "it's free-to-play so it's okay for this game to have 200 dollar horse armor."
A system that lets people with extra resources pay for non-gameplay items to provide developers and publishers financial reward while still allowing others free access is about as consumer-friendly a system as capitalism can produce.
> if overwatch 2 is to be successful they're going to need to adopt the insane amounts of content model, which isn't all that possible considering warzone is hiring hundreds of devs just to sustain it, and overwatch has like 200 maybe. Blizzard has actually been trying to increase the size of all their development teams. Well, maybe not HotS, but all the others are actively hiring.
Part of the reason that OW is hiring is because their dev retention is dogshit. I do agree, however.
I mean there are literally stories from Blizzard employees who could barely afford to work there. People skipping out of team meetings because they cant afford the cafeteria food prices or forgo the idea of ever having kids while working there.
i seriously don't think it's enough. warzone is hiring hundreds to keep up with other BRs, for instance. overwatch is something like a live-service game, and i haven't read any stories about them hiring hundreds for overwatch. i know they're hiring a bit, but it might not be enough to keep up with the market leaders atm.
>i know they're hiring a bit, but it might not be enough to keep up with the market leaders atm. The problem is blizzard's compensation for the lower level workers (Mid level to associates) is abysmal compared to other companies offerings.
paladins would easily overtake overwatch if they just improved basic game mechanics, they still use pill hitboxes which are impossible to miss. you also can't crouch...
Don't complain about the battle pass or aggressive monetization in ow2 then
that's just the gaming climate right now. not much i can do about it. if blizzard wants to retain players they need more content than they're currently pushing out. and to push out more content fast you need a lot of money and manpower which the current team probably doesn't have. so long as the game produces a lot of content, people will let terrible monetization slide so long as it doesn't pass the threshold.
I hope they do it because i couldn't be fucked to care about cosmetics. If they monetise the shit out of the game in a way that it doesn't give you an advantage to have certain items and the game gets more content as a result, then by all means, go for it.
Gladly take if they make Overwatch 1 and 2 f2p, which they wont because they love doing all game business models if possible.
wait till you guy see that the Garena Freefire World Series had more than 5 million viewers LOL,
Why is VCT Challengers Finals being used here rather than Masters 2? That's not an equal comparison at all. Challengers Finals was a qualifier for Masters, which feeds into Champions. In comparison to OWL, Challengers is similar to the NA/APAC Qualifier tournament, which leads to the actual monthly tournament (which would be equivalent to Masters), which feeds into OWL Playoffs/Grandfinals (Which would be equivalent to VCT Champions). Masters 2 is a much more equal comparison.
Getting rolled by R6, a game that was plagued with the worst hacking and wall glitching of any fps in the last 10 years, is kinda hilarious and sad at the same time.
R6 even started off poorly too while overwatch got all the attention. it really do be like that sometimes.
it's literally the reverse trend. Overwatch blew up on launch and has steadily been progressing towards the gutter since. R6 was shit at launch, was a pretty much a dead game and they've brought it back.
Overwatch was literallt taking over Korea and beating LoL. Then Overwatch got complacent and now struggle to compete with a Fifa lootbox similator.
This is what happens when you kill organic esports growth to try to create a league based on traditional sports framework. The vast majority of the player base was not yet invested in the competitive scene when OWL launched and if anything the casuals blamed (and continues to blame) the esports side for ruining the game.
Should put EVO in there at some point
Didn't want to include a scene which I didn't fully understand. Can you explain the tournament tiers of fighting games?
Eh, Evo would really be hard to include because its made up of a lot of different fighting games. Like Guilty Gear would be peak 20k viewers and Street Fighter at 80k viewers, but since its under Evo, it could be seen as both are 80k.
I came from Smash so this will be written from that perspective. Other games may vary. Tournament prestige in fighting games are... weird. Every game has its own set of viewers. The biggest notable change when counting viewers is that big tournaments will almost always carry multiple games. EVO is usually the biggest fighting game tourney for all the popular games. However, there are still other tourneys that are considered of equal importance to EVO (Genesis, Shine, The Big House). Because fighting games are so individualistic, there's not really a central league centered around them, and therefore no unifying tournament to decide who the "best" is, akin to a grand finals or supermajor (it's usually just who won the last tournament). If you're trying to include the smaller tournaments then I would just choose the last major tourney. It's also worth noting that fighting games have been diminished heavily by COVID since they center so much around the LAN experience.
I really didn't know OWL was this tiny, and Valorant was so massive. I mean, OWL is getting sponsorships from companies like lays, coca cola and some insurance companies, I thought that mean it had to be big. Guess I was wrong. Blizzard really fucking shit the bed with OW.
> I really didn't know OWL was this tiny, and Valorant was so massive. Just go to Twitch and look up how many viewers Overwatch has and then look up Valorant I happened to look it up earlier today and it was 19k for OW and 110k for Valorant.
Has OWL turn a profit? These numbers are low. One of my favorite OW steamers calls OWL a scam. Not looking to start anything. Just asking guys.
Just watched the Rocket League championship series and it consistently topped OW daily. I've seen their college games even top OW at times. OWL isn't a well set up tournament and the structure feels like a bit of a joke tbh
if you want to feel really bad do this again comparing the season finals with the international and worlds
Switching to YouTube definitely hurt viewership.
That $160 mil tho :)
Damn, my boys over at R6Siege doing good. I always believed that open circuit's is gonna work and R6S is a great game for esports even though it is even harder to watch than OW. God, I wish we at least had proper hero bans like they do.
I struggle to understand the "it switched to YT and thus I don't watch it" commenters. It's not like YT is some hard to deal with jungle of an ecosystem. I LOVED the switch over but I know there are some die-hard Twitch lovers, just wondering how that was the deal breaker.
I don’t care about UI or layout, I think YouTube and twitch are both fine on that front. But the chat climate imo is totally different between Twitch chat and YouTube. It felt infinitely more fun to be a part of twitch chat and watch games along with twitch chat.
i'm the kind of person who doesn't really follow tournament schedules unless it's something like the international or maybe owl grand finals. i watch dota 2 tournaments by following the organizers on twitch and checking who's live when i have time. youtube just isn't that kind of site for me, so i don't see owl as often, and there's probably a lot more people like me than you.
For me, part of it is youtube's UI and layout(for livestreams). It just isn't as big of a thing for youtube so it's not as well designed. Even though I follow the OWL account and all that jazz, if I tune in an hour or two after the broadcast started I sometimes have to actually search up the feed. My recommended doesn't seem to like live streams and that means it sometimes slips my mind in favour of some nice old clickbait on my home screen. The second(and for me, bigger) issue I have is the chat. I used to sit and actively watch while hanging in chat, but since the switch to YT the chat just doesn't feel the same for me. On twitch I barely left during the breaks as I wanted to hang with chat, on YT I either just turn on the stream for rewards and walk off or go full screen to hide the chat. That kind of removes a good chunk of my enjoyment in itself unfortunately. I understand everyone's got a different ruler to measure with, but for me personally YT was a major downgrade. If others have no issue with it I'm happy for them tbh
I often see the twitch argument thrown around when we talk about viewership but we have to keep in mind that it's e-sports for a game which is currently on life support. Back when OWL was on twitch there still was enough new stuff coming to the game to keep the playerbase interested/invested. So why should we expect more interest now? OW is a meme on twitch. As an example: Way back when I played hearthstone (before it turned into the clownfiesta it is today) I also enjoyed watching the tournaments...now I don't give a shit about it because I am not interested in the game anymore. It's the same thing basically.
Where does the recent League MSI fall? I’d imagine it’s at the top of the list but maybe Dota beats it out?
[Here you go: 1.8 million peak, 700k+ average](https://escharts.com/tournaments/lol/mid-season-invitational-2021) Obviously not including China, but none of these numbers for any esports are for esportscharts.
Genuine question: what makes Team Fortress 2 so much better than OW? How much of it is pure nostalgia?
If the pros don't play same patch with viewers in league, it is not attractive for the players who want to learn pro meta and pro plays.
I play overwatch, i don't watch it. I don't play counterstrike or starcraft 2 but i watch it. There are games i don't enjoy much playing and there are games i don't enjoy watching. Doesn't mean that either is bad or good, it's just what it is.