How did the Overwatch League 2022 Finals attract a huge audience?

Overwatch League's fifth anniversary season ended in early November. For the first time in three years, the tournament's decisive matches were attended by fans who cheered on their favorite teams at the Anaheim Convention Center. San Francisco Shock, the two-time OWL champion, was defeated by Dallas Fuel with a score of 3-4 in a tense battle. The main match of the tournament has become the most popular one in the discipline over the past five years. But how did the league, which had been losing its audience in recent years, manage to return to the "golden era" of Overwatch?

Overwatch League Viewership Statistics in Dynamics

Overwatch League is certainly one of the biggest and most ambitious esports projects of the 2010s. However, it couldn't be called a success, at least in terms of viewership statistics: it was true up until the Season 5 Playoffs. The league (and the entire Overwatch discipline) record for Peak Viewers was set at the very beginning of the debut season in 2018, and since then the number of viewers (both Average and Peak) had been dropping.

Overwatch League Playoffs draw fewer and fewer viewers season by season

Overwatch League 2022 regular season tournament statistics followed the negative trend as well. While the Peak Viewers number at some events was higher than at similar championships in 2021, the Average Viewers number steadily decreased.

Overwatch League 2022 kicked off in early May and the first three events of the season saw AV numbers 27-40% lower than the year before. Overwatch 2 was released worldwide at the beginning of October, but this fact hardly had an impact on the league's statistics: the last OWL 2022 event before Playoffs (Countdown Cup) took place after the global release of the new game, but this didn't have a positive effect on the statistics: the AV number dropped by 23% compared with the same tournament in 2021. The miracle happened only at the Playoffs.

The final stage of OWL was held from October 30 to November 5, and the tournament matches were on air for over 45 hours. In that time, the championship accumulated over 9.9 million Hours Watched, which is 35% more than the first event of regular season, which was on for 100 hours longer.

The AV number at the matches was 216.8K, which is the highest total of any tournament in the discipline since 2017, when Overwatch World Cup games drew 213K AV.

Three Overwatch League 2022 Playoffs games drew more than 300K Peak Viewers, and the most popular match was the Grand Final, as expected. Up to 397.8K Peak Viewers watched the San Francisco Shock vs. Dallas Fuel battle: only two matches in the history of the discipline have attracted more viewers, and both of them were held in the debut season of OWL.

Top 5 tournaments in the history of Overwatch by Peak and Average Viewers

What helped Overwatch League 2022 show phenomenal growth during the Playoffs?

Overwatch 2 Release

The first and most important driver of the league's audience growth is the global release of Overwatch 2. The closed beta test of the shooter began back in spring, and then Overwatch set a new record on Twitch, attracting over 1.45 million Peak Viewers (the 13th result among all categories of the platform) thanks to popular streamers. In short, gamers were really looking forward to the title's release.

Activision Blizzard reported that 35 million gamers played Overwatch 2 in its first month since the release. Despite the fact that these numbers are lower than those of other popular free-to-play shooters (Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone), we can say that the release was a success.

It is interesting that OWL Season 1 was held in the Overwatch 2 beta version. It seemed that just because of this, the audience of the tournament should have grown compared to 2021, but it did not happen. Moreover, the game was released on October 4, and the penultimate OWL 2022 event began on October 15 — and its statistics gave no indication that the viewership would increase significantly during the Playoffs.

Drops

Overwatch 2 had been showing phenomenal viewership numbers on Twitch, one of the largest streaming platforms in the world, from its release until November 6. The game was at the top of the categories for several weeks, despite having to compete with such giants as League of Legends, CS:GO, and Dota 2, which also hosted the world esports championships.

The secret to the game's success on Twitch is in drops. If you had a Battle.net account linked to Twitch, you could get exclusive skins and other in-game bonuses for watching the broadcasts: Twitch Drops system is known to help attract a huge number of viewers who don't regularly watch the game broadcasts.

Overwatch League was exclusively broadcasted on YouTube, but viewers of the tournament could get in-game gifts there as well. The OWL drop system has been active for a long time, but this year it was slightly changed: the number of prizes increased and they were given for every 3 hours of watching the event (up to 30 hours), which motivated the audience to follow the event almost throughout its duration.

As a result, Overwatch League 2022 attracted a record audience. But it's a big question whether the league will be able to keep up this trend in the new season, by the beginning of which the hype around the game's release is sure to fade away.