Credit: Blizzard Entertainment
The Hearthstone 
World Championship produced 3.1M hours watched for its four days of competition on Twitch from April 25-28, up from last year’s event which produced 2.4M hours watched in January of 2018.
While the event saw a boost in overall hours watched, the average viewership of the event didn’t improve much. This year’s 37K average concurrent viewership for all coverage on the official Hearthstone Twitch channel was nearly identical to last year’s 36K CCV for coverage from Jan. 18-21.
The peak viewership for the event predictably came on the last day of action at Taipei Heping Basketball Stadium. Even though the tournament had a less-than-accommodating broadcast schedule for an American audience, it still reached 141K CCV on Sunday morning. For comparison, last January’s event, which took place in Amsterdam, peaked at 150K.
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Prior to this year’s event, Blizzard announced plans to overhaul competitive Hearthstone. Following this past week’s event, the game’s esports will be primarily moved to online tournaments and the coming season will include more than $4M USD in prize money.
Last week marked the fifth year for the Hearthstone World Championship, but prior to the event’s culminating tournament taking place in Amsterdam in 2018, the finale for the World Championship took place in the fall at BlizzCon.
This year’s event came following the release of a new card expansion called Rise of Shadows, which generated strong viewership for the game. However, ultimately the expansion proved to be less stimulating for the game on Twitch than an expansion that came out around the same time during the previous year.
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The tournament also follows a year of declining viewership for Hearthstone, and with the entry of MTG Arena as a competitive online card game, Blizzard Entertainment’s
