Role Queue really damaged Overwatch more than you think.
Overwatch Monthly viewers from Twitch tracker:
June 2019: 42,7k
July 2019: 39,3k
August 2019: 47,1k - Role queue beta season
September 2019: 30,3k
October 2019: 14,6k
November 2019: 22,3k
December 2019: 18,9k.
[…]
March 2020: 20,9k
April 2020: 19,0k - Echo was released
May 2020: 19,9k
Average monthly viewership in 2018: 34,6k
Average monthly viewership in 2019: 32,5k ( - 6.1%)
Average monthly viewership in 2020: 19,4k ( - 40.3%)
Average monthly viewership in 2021: 15,0k ( - 22.7%)
TLDR;
When Role queue was released, Overwatch’s category on twitch lost over 40% of its viewers.
The month Echo was released, Overwatch’s category did worse than previous months, despite a fairly big streamer TimTheTatman (7M followers) streaming her launch.
Though there have been plenty of other factors at the time so we can’t really rule out what exactly caused it.
Next to that, viewership doesn’t mean much to direct playcount.
Whilst the game might be less fun to watch, or a big streamer stopped playing, it shall not directly affect the playcount.
I thought about that.
But he came back to Overwatch and there wasn’t a huge peak those last few months. So I don’t think he’s that relevant in the big picture.
I didn’t think about that though, and it does explain those numbers.
You made a good argument that Role Queue made Overwatch a less-watchable game on Twitch. You did, however, fail to note that Overwatch viewer numbers were already on a downward trend well before June 2019. People were already tuning out - the queue times just didn’t help.
You also realise that there’s no evidence of any correlation between Twitch viewership and playercount though, right? Just a few minutes comparing the Steam Charts to the Twitch homepage will show that the numbers are all over the place and are highly dependent on who is playing a given game, events that are running, new content releases, and a number of other factors.
Viewcount trends are useful and they’re good at gauging watchability and general interest over time. They aren’t a great indicator of playercount.
It’s not the dominant mode cause blizzard said they balance the game for 222 so open queue is treated like qp by most. I hate role lock and would much rather be playing open queue but the truth is match quality is just bad, full of leavers and giggling children screwing around. It’s not the same as it used to be, the competitive mindset is weak in open queue, nobody cares if they win or lose.
I don’t think the devs would have spent the money and time on developing and implementing RQ if OW wasn’t already in trouble. It can’t have been a trivial undertaking. Here’s hoping that 122 succeeds where 222 failed.
What got the game into trouble was making over half the roster dps and launching brig which enabled goats and then they couldn’t figure out how to balance the game so threw in role lock. It was a cop out. If they actually had a competent balance team we’d still be playing open queue and the game was far more dynamic and interesting without role restrictions.
Yes the drop here was not RQ thought I am sure it had some impact. It’s was more the issues surrounding OWL, XQC and others, etc. leaving and the switch to YT.
That’s an unreasonable expectation in a game that has been literally neglected since Echo came out in April 2020…
