Overwatch League 
viewership hit a bit of a sophomore slump as the second season’s second stage kicked off this past weekend to the tune of 3.39M hours watched on Twitch , down from 3.9M hours watched last year.
The dip in hours watched for live match sessions was paired with a dip in average concurrent viewership to 107K, down from 152K CCV for the first week of stage 2 last year. As one would expect, those average and total viewership figures are down from opening weekend, as OWL begins the middle quarters of its regular season that ends in August.
However, the year-over-year drop comes despite the league’s expansion to 20 teams that forced the week’s schedule to jump from 12 to 16 matches that are sprawled across Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
During the first stage of the 2019, OWL saw consistent growth in both hours watched and average viewership, but with a new stage kicking off the audience drop off was significantly harder than last year’s decline from stage one to stage two.
It is worth noting, however, that as a part of the league’s expansion, three of the eight teams added to the Overwatch League are geolocated to China, which does not have access to Twitch. Instead OWL broadcasts in China are on Zhangi.tv, NetEase CC, Bilibili, and Huya.
While that by no means is a full explanation for a drop in audience, missing viewership statistics from those broadcasts prevents us from being able to see the full picture of viewership for a league that has four Chinese teams out of 20 total franchises.
As was the case with the league’s major viewership figures, peak viewership across the weekend was down year-over-year as well. The max CCV on OWL’s main Twitch channel last year was more than 160K every day during the first week of stage two. This year the peak for the weekend was 117K CCV.
Peak viewership for the weekend came in the middle of the broadcast on Sunday, despite the day consisting of uncompetitive matches. The first three matches of the day were sweeps with San Francisco Shock , London Spitfire and Vancouver Titans all winning. The final game was a 3-1 victory by the Chengdu Hunters against the Washington Justice.
While Twitch remains the primary platform for measuring viewership habits of the core Western esports audience, it does not represent the totality of Overwatch League viewership. Fans can watch action on OWL’s official website, Battle.net, and MLG. Additionally, matches are streamed in China on Zhanqi.tv, NetEase CC, Bilibili, and Huya, and Blizzard also has a deal to broadcast matches on Disney-owned platforms including ESPN, ABC, and Disney XD.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article included data from an earlier week of competition in the analysis of peak matches.
