Overwatch reaches over 100,000 live viewers at the Esports World Cup thanks to community casters
As part of the ongoing Esports World Cup 2024, the Overwatch Esports World Cup 2024 event reached a peak viewership of 100.2K concurrent viewers for its grand final, becoming one of the most popular events of the year. The viewership for this third-party event fell just behind the recent Overwatch Champions Series 2024 Major, which reached 25K more concurrent viewers at peak.
The OWCS Major also acted as a qualifying event for this recent EWC tournament, with the ESL FACEIT Group being involved with the organization of both events. The EWC event was the most-popular third-party Overwatch esports tournament since the Crazy Raccoon Cup #3, which took place just a little over a year ago.
The EWC’s step into Overwatch esports for this year was highly watched, but with a $1,050,000 prize pool and some of the best teams from all around the world, viewership could have reached mugh higher for the event. The EWC’s event failed to connect with some of Overwatch’s core audiences; on the other hand, the event did connect with some regional audiences better than the recent OWCS Major thanks to various community casters.
In total, the 5 days of Overwatch competition in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, generated 1.7M Hours Watched. Although the event’s peak viewership came close to the viewership of the recent OWCS Major, viewership throughout the entire event was not as high. Excluding the top three most popular matches, which are all late-stage playoffs matches, viewership for the event was much lower.
Throughout the entire event, the Esports World Cup 2024’s Overwatch tournament received 33.3K Average Viewers. This is roughly similar to what the OWCS 2024 regional circuits have achieved on their own so far this year, but far less than the Major tournament. The semi final between Japanese orgnaization ZETA DIVISION and North American organization Toronto Ultra was the event’s most popular match, and the only match of the event to reach over 100K concurrent viewers.
Crazy Raccoon, another Japanese organization fielding South Korean players, advanced to the event’s grand final, where they swiftly dispatched Toronto Ultra and took home $400,000 in prize pool money, and 1000 points for the EWC 2024 Club Championship. However, despite the success of Japanese organizations at the event, Japanese viewership for the event was particularly low, and the language did not even rank within the event’s top three most popular languages by PV.
Japanese-language viewership has become a staple of Overwatch esports, second to only English-language audiences. The event’s timing was unfortunate for Japanese audiences, with the grand final of the event beginning at 4am in Japan. While this negatively impacted the event’s total peak viewership, it did give a chance for other languages to shine, especially through community casters.
Livestreaming titan and former Overwatch professional esports player xQc was the most popular broadcaster of the entire event, reaching 38.8K Peak Viewers for his coverage of the Grand Final. The Canadian streamer brought a massive English-speaking audience to the event, accounting for a majority of the total English-language peak viewership. XQc was brought into the event as an EWC Partner, and the decision to partner with the Canadian streamer was extremely beneficial for the event’s viewership.
Aside from xqc, other famous internet personalities such as SergioFFerra and Gaules broadcasted some of the event to their Twitch channels. The former Spanish Twitch partner is a content creator for Movistar KOI, and KOI founder ibai helped Sergio to reach this peak through a 24.5K viewer Twitch Raid. Sergio’s 14.3K PV was enough to single-handedly drive Spanish to become the event’s third-most-popular language, outperforming Japanese audiences by a couple thousand concurrent viewers.
Gaules tuned into the EWC event shortly in-between games of a Counter-Strike event. The famed Brazilian creator saw viewership immediately fall for this short period of Overwatch coverage, which is to be expected, as the creator is most well known for his Counter-Strike content.
Aside from these creators, Saudi Arabian streamers YZNSA and owBRAIN also contributed significantly to the event’s success, with them reaching 9.5K PV and 5.3K PV, respectively. Along with the EWC’s official broadcasting accounts, these two creators were critical for Arabic becoming the second-most popular language of Overwatch’s EWC 2024 event.
In regard to official broadcasting channels for the event, the official English-language Twitch channel, ewc_gold, was the most popular official option for fans to watch the event with 26.7K PV. This channel was also the most-watched broadcaster of the entire event, reaching 361.6K Hours Watched in total.
Aside from this official Twitch broadcast, the EWC official TikTok accounts were particularly popular. The Arabic-language account was even more popular than the English-speaking one, highlighting the influence of TikTok as a mobile livestreaming platform in the MENA region.
WDGJAPAN_OW was the only non-EWC entry to the official broadcasters side of our statistics, with the Japanese account reaching 11.5K PV. As mentioned, the event’s matches took place during unfortunate timings for Japanese audiences, and Japanese Overwatch fans are one of the biggest regional audiences for the esports discipline in the world. Viewership for this account could have been much higher, with a Drops-enabled rebroadcast of the OWSC 2024 Major reaching 13.8K PV in June this year.
The Esports World Cup 2024 was one of the most popular third-party events the Overwatch esports scene has had in years. However, with a seven-figure prize pool, viewership could have been much higher for the event if it had effectively tapped into Japanese and English-speaking audiences better.
While this remains true, the EWC did successful tap into Arabic and Spanish-speaking audiences, improving viewership for these audiences compared to the recent 2024 Major. The EWC’s partnership with various community casters and streamers throughout the event was critical for the viewership of the tournament, and this is just another reason why the event was one of the most-popular third-party Overwatch events ever.
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