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
title may have to fight for a viewership share in the market that iy previously had effectively monopolized.
Earlier this year, the first significant MTG Arena tournament, the Mythic Invitational, had a 5.5-hour session for its finale that averaged 96K CCV, peaking at 126K. Other sessions of live coverage averaged around 50-60K CCV from Friday-Sunday. Most of Hearthstone’s top sessions for this weekend averaged around 45-50K CCV with two 11-hour sessions eclipsing 60K CCV on Saturday and Sunday.
While Hearthstone may be receiving some competition for esports-related viewers, its strength as the top card game on Twitch is still enough to make it the most-watched on Twitch so far this year. As Blizzard continues to shift the way it structures Hearthstone esports, the viewership the game recieves on Twitch will likely begin to transform as well moving forward.
