Overwatch League draws more than 10m viewers

Long-awaited Blizzard esports competition is often to a great start.

Blizzard's highly anticipated new Overwatch League was watched by more than 10 million viewers over the first four days of competition last week.

That's according to stats released by Blizzard, which also noted that it had an average audience per minute of 408,000 on opening day and 280,000 for the week.

Viewers tuned in on exclusive partner Twitch, MLG, and Chinese streaming partners ZhanQi TV, NetEase CC, and Panda TV.

Twitch and MLG alone accounted for a peak concurrent audience of 437,000 during the day-one match between Dallas Fuel and Seoul Dynasty, which the Dynasty eventually won 2-1.

Apparently tickets to the Blizzard Arena Los Angeles were also sold out for the whole week.

Blizzard is obviously very happy with these stats, which it will feel are a vindication of its painstaking incubation of the league, team franchises and broadcast team.

Having launched in mid-2016 and attracted widespread interest from competitive players, Blizzard's announcement that it planned to launch the Overwatch League stuck a knife in the aspirations of various other tournament organizers and disrupted the nascent scene considerably, leading to suggestions the whole thing could kill off Overwatch as an esport rather than propelling it to the top table.

Judging by these stats, Blizzard may have known what it was doing after all, but perhaps the real proof will be in how things look in a few weeks' time.

Editor-at-Large

Tom is probably best known for the 15 years - FIFTEEN YEARS! - he spent at Eurogamer, one of Europe's biggest independent gaming sites. Now he roams the earth, but will always have a home here at AllGamers. You can try and raise him from his deep, abyssal slumber through tom.bramwell@allgamers.com or he's also on Twitter.

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