Um, viewership for Overwatch used to average at like 50-80k a year ago.
So if you used to average 50-80k, and now you average 15k-20k that’s… A drop. Even if that drop is sustained over several months, it’s still a decrease in viewership averages.
It’s not even that.
It’s a single fact taken out of context where on one platform (that they don’t broadcast their league on anymore) is down.
Yeah there is also doubts that OW2 is going to be worth whatever price tag it is/it’s not going to be a great form of PvE content… at this point I would be more interested in it being a solo play game than put up with team play drama any further
Because taking yoru data at the exact time when all the viewers of competitive Overwatch aren’t on the platform isn’t a just a mistake, it looks voluntarily misleading.
I don’t care about the numbers on Youtube, the thing is that viewers aren’t where you look for them. It’s like taking the number of viewers of League of Legends the day of the big worlds final and claiming “look, the game only has 20K spectators on not-esport streams, which shows the game is failling hard in being watchable outside of competitions”
Hey if you want to argue that Overwatch is Mega Popular just somewhere else, be my guest; I am not privy or ‘in’ all aspects of the Internet, I can only report what I personally see.
In MY spheres of the internet, Overwatch went from being very popular, with fanart and fancontent being regularly made and enjoyed - to nothing. I haven’t seen a fanart pop up on any of my feeds in… Well over 6 months, probably closer to 8 at this point. I’ve noticed twitch viewership has sharply declined because I regularly go over there and watch streamers, so I’ve noticed that the number used to regularly say 50k, 60k, 80k, it’s now regularly saying 15k, 20k, 12k, etc. These are BIG differences, especially since twitch is still the ‘go to’ place for streaming still.
Considering OW did so much to move over to youtube I’m sure there’s lots of viewers there, but to me just viewers isn’t the same as… General popularity. I think that both twitch numbers are down (and it’s right to expect them to be down, considering all that happened with youtube and OW) -and- it’s base popularity is fading off. It’ll last, the game is built too well to just disappear overnight or anything, but I think the original point of ‘it’s less popular than it used to be’ still holds true regardless of all those factors.
I’m not arguing anything, I’m stating that you are taking a single statistic and trying to infer something from it. The only thing you can say is that 15k people are watching Overwatch on Twitch, it means nothing.
I follow many artists on many different platforms and still seeing just as much OW fan art.
20-35k * I don’t know where y’oure taking your data from. Probably July 2016.
And we’re talking with the massive spikes of spectators for OWL, which happens on Youtube gaming now.
Overall yhea, that’s a bit lower. Like, if you lack any sense of analysis about the context, that’s right. But what’s the point then ?
When you switch platform of streaming and take out the tokens you get from watching it…and sum to that the goats meta which wasted it completely…
Dive was fun to see but goats, so boring nobody dies, even with ults.
My data is just from me visiting twitch and watching streamers, I’m not talking hard and fast science here, just general perceptions. My general perception is that Overwatch has significantly declined in popularity; if y’all disagree that’s fine, but I used to see a lot more people streaming, lot more people viewing, and a lot more people participating in the fan culture. I don’t see much of that anymore, it seems like the general interest is down by about… idk, roughly 60-75%? And these are just feelings, so hey, disregard them and carry on with your day if you like.
It’s not like what some rando’s think are going to make Overwatch more or less popular, it’ll fly or flail regardless. Personally I think the game is being severely mismanaged and that it’s sort of obvious from the death of the fancommunity, but with Covid and everything and no conventions to go to this year it’ll be harder than ever to really feel out just how much people don’t like the game anymore.
This is not true - it is significant because Twitch is by far the primary way people watch live streaming of video games in NA/EU-centered regions. Viewership numbers are also hugely correlated with the popularity of a game. If viewership on a game is down on Twitch it is no stretch to conclude that popularity is also down.
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To be honest… things don’t look all that impressive on YouTube Gaming either…
- Fortnite - 73K
- Counter-strike Global Offensive - 38k
- Apex Legends - 19k
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege 8.9k
- Call of Duty Warzone - 8.7k
- Valorant - 8.6k
- Overwatch - 4.6k
- Escape from Tarkov - 356 people
Hunt Showdown and Paladins were absent…
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That was my suspicion, but I didn’t want to be a total jerk and go look it up myself. Also I just… Don’t like youtube that much =/ and I’ve never even watched a gamer on there, so I wouldn’t know where to look.
Well to be fair the people defending overwatch are just diehard fans. Other games are doing way better and it shows. Also Fortnite isn’t a game I actively play but I have to acknowledge that they do a really good job at selling the game.
Content is always put out. They don’t leave things too late and they are bold and innovative.
Most importantly the game is FUN! Yes you can’t exactly transfer your skills from OW to Fortnite (one of the off putting things for me) but the game can be really fun because you can literally meme your way to victory and do stupid stuff.
Overwatch is just too overbearing and suffocating for casual players to enjoy anymore. If anything the game is nothing more than a toxic flex of who has the most gold medal or which character is brokenly overpowered atm because blizzard is only listening to the 1%
Not always, if they are streaming on their own platform or another (like say broadcasting their league on Youtube Gaming for instance) platform that is hugely popular the twitch numbers mean nothing which is the case here.
Without taking into context the OWL viewership numbers (which btw is skewing your twitch numbers down since they were removed from there) the twitch numbers mean nothing.
- Fortnite - 73K
- Counter-strike Global Offensive - 38k
- Apex Legends - 19k
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege 8.9k
- Call of Duty Warzone - 8.7k
- Valorant - 8.6k
- Overwatch - 4.6k
- Escape from Tarkov - 356 people
Yeah… to be honest when you have former Overwatch players from Australia like the Click gang with Muselk etc leading the charge on YouTube for Fornite who is popular for casual, funny and meme videos, things aren’t going to look so hot. I mean xQc is only popular because he rages and that behaviour is not healthy for the community as a whole as kids mimic him.
Plus Overwatch was supposely aimed at Casual Player according to Geoff Goodman and honestly, it doesn’t feel that way. So Overwatch is just an exhausted mess of a game.
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ok, then look at twitch stats and you’ll see that
March 2019 35,714
February 2019 35,175
January 2019 30,269
December 2018 22,705
November 2018 31,012
October 2018 21,763
September 2018 28,585
so yhea, these stats were stritcly higher and sometimes it even was significantly higher August 2019 47,148, but like 2 mounths later, which is 8 mounths ago “when you used too still see many fan arts from the game” October 2019 14,659.
Now, without OWL, it is
July 2020 21,232
June 2020 21,328
May 2020 19,935
It’s hard to evaluate what OWL brings because it’s just during the week end, but let’s say it’s not that much: Yhea stats are lower than they were a year ago. Yet there hasn’t been a HUGE drop from 50-80k, that’s just not the case despite your perception, which i believe is genius.
Now all of that being said, I won’t deny it’s unpleasant and kind of worrying to see that it has been about a year since the last peak of average above 35K viewers. But considering OW has stopped the real updates to focus on OW2, that the e-sport events that cause the viewers peaks, the decline of viewers shows that, indeed, the game is losing interest. What i’m trying to prove you with my data and reasoning is that this decline is far from being a drastic disaster.
are you voluntarily taking the data from Twitch when OWL is live on Youtube and the data from youtube when OWL has finished broadcasting, or are you taking your data randomly ?
I’m not denying that OW has lost a lot of popularity, and I can only hope OW2 changes that, but your way to elaborate on how OW is suffering, using every argument, even the obviously misleading ones, is irritating.
The problem there is that OW2 is strictly PvE not PvP so Overwatch 2 will have no impact on the current play style of Overwatch… if anything you might have a UI update but everything is going to stay THE FREAKING SAME!!!
Best possible thing you can get out of it is story mode content from content creators? That’s about it… there really isn’t much the game can offer and I don’t think Story mode is going to be that huge of a hit unless it is like pacted full of content and lore and has relevance to it and not just repeatable missions… like there needs to be voice acting, story and cinematics not just Archive mode content.
It’s been at 15-20k for a while now. I’m pretty sure people just watch for the personalities and not as much for the gameplay now
Paladins was literally in development before OW was.
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