The first global tournament of the new season of Overwatch League, Midseason Madness, starts in just a week. After the overwhelming success of the OWL 2022 Playoffs, it was expected that the league would continue to show impressive results, but this did not happen. The audience for tournaments fluctuates greatly and depends largely on in-game drops and the popularity of the two divisions of the league, West and East.
The final tournament of Overwatch League 2022 drew over 397K Peak Viewers, and it was watched for a total of more than 9.9 million hours. Unfortunately, the league was not able to maintain a positive trend, as the first tournaments of the new season showed a similar, but slightly less active audience than similar events last year.
In the new season, the organizers seriously changed the tournament structure by involving teams from the Overwatch Contenders series, who were given the opportunity to compete on equal terms with participants from the franchise league. However, this did not lead to any positive shifts in terms of the concurrent viewership for the tournaments.
For instance, the Pro-Am tournament, in which OWL teams and the best representatives of regional Overwatch Contenders leagues participated, attracted only 36.7K Peak Viewers. Unfortunately, this is the worst result among the events in the series with a prize pool of $100K+. Subsequent Spring Stage events were more popular among the audience thanks to rewards for watching, which appeared in the league exactly from this stage.
The Spring Stage Qualifiers, whose matches started with the Los Angeles Gladiators vs. Toronto Defiant in the first week, attracted the largest audience among the completed events of the season, reaching 118.2K PV. It is noteworthy that it was precisely the games of the first week (when viewers could earn League Tokens for watching streams) that gathered over 100K PV. After that, the audience dropped sharply, and the most popular match of the following days only gathered 92.3K PV.
More notably, the OWL 2023 Spring Stage Knockouts were significantly less popular among viewers than the qualifiers. The average audience plummeted by almost 20K viewers, and the Peak Viewers number decreased by almost half (to 60K PV), although almost the same teams participated in the tournament as in the qualifying stage.
It should be noted that during the Spring Stage, viewers could only earn skins for Genji and Orisa for watching streams, which also did not contribute to audience growth. Viewers did not have enough incentives to watch matches after receiving rewards.
The Midseason Madness takes place on June 15-17, and viewers will be able to receive various rewards for watching it. In theory, this should increase the audience coverage, but given the instability of the league's performance, it is not certain that it will be a significant boost.
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