Blizzard loses a spectacular 99% of its viewers on Twitch in 6 days on Overwatch 2

The Overwatch 2 beta broke a record on May 27 with 1.5 million concurrent viewers. A week later, on May 3, Blizzard’s new shooter is bobbing around with 14,000 simultaneous viewers. 99% of the viewers are gone – the hype apparently only lasted for a short time.

This was the record:

• On Wednesday, April 27th, Overwatch achieved a supposedly huge and surprising success on Twitch: Over 1.5 million simultaneous viewers saw Blizzard’s new shooter
• Blizzard celebrated the success of the beta on Twitch: Overwatch 1 hadn’t even come close to reaching that many viewers on Twitch in the 6 years before, Blizzard tweeted happily (via twitter). The old viewer record from 2018 was pulverized.
• But the record only came about because many viewers watched Overwatch 2 to get beta access. Because that was via activated twitch drops. You had to watch for 4 hours.

These heroes are strong in the beta:

The day after the record, 19 out of 20 spectators were gone

How did it go afterwards? April 27 was a clear exception day for Overwatch:

• The very next day, April 28, Overwatch peaked at just 69,000 viewers – by then 95.4% of the viewers had disappeared.
• On May 2nd, it was only enough for 27,000 viewers – 98.2% of the viewers were gone
• Now on May 3rd, at the hour, Overwatch still has 14,446 viewers – that means 99.04% of the record viewers are gone

Limited-time action leads to limited-time hype

What does that mean? Well, Overwatch 2 is still in an early beta and only the PvP part is playable: To a casual viewer, the Overwatch 2 beta looks exactly like Overwatch 1. The changes are more in the details and mostly your own to remember playing.

But it already seems clear that Riot Games’ “trick” of giving away beta access to Valorant exclusively and randomly via Twitch Drops only caused a brief hype at Blizzard.

At Valorant, the hype lasted for months, but the keys were difficult to get – that’s not the case with Overwatch 2. There, the beta for Overwatch 2 was guaranteed via Twitch Drops and the campaign only ran for a short time. The trick therefore only triggered a flash of fire, which, however, burned extremely brightly.

Whether Overwatch can latch on to Twitch and keep viewers interested in the long term we’ll see as the game progresses and the PvE portion is seen.

Our assessment for Overwatch 2 can be found here:

Overwatch 2 feels like a whole new game, although almost everything has stayed the same