BlizzCon, the annual gaming convention held by Blizzard Entertainment, held its 2023 edition at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. The event featured many activities and was covered by various community members in live-streaming as well as broadcasted on official Blizzard channels on Twitch and YouTube. BlizzCon was hugely popular among community members, so let’s take a look at which channels received the highest viewership and how the event performed overall.
In total, over 3.3K individual channels on various live-streaming platforms covered the BlizzCon 2023 event. The event accumulated 8.65M Hours Watched and 80% of this watch time came from English-language broadcasts.
Various other languages were represented both in-person and from home; Spanish, German, and French-language broadcasts were the most prominent of the other languages, contributing 5.7%, 3.8% and 3% of the total watch time, respectively.
Across the over 250 hours of broadcasting time from the collective total channels, 207.8K Peak Viewers was reached by one singular channel: zackrawrr, better known as Asmongold. The American Blizzard fan routinely goes live on his secondary channel, and he was the most popular streamer of BlizzCon 2023 thanks to his reactions to the upcoming World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion, the first of three new expansions to come.
Behind zackrawrr, the official Blizzard live-streaming channels on Twitch and YouTube Live finished up the podium places. Both of these channels were popular on their respective platforms, although the Blizzard Twitch channel pushed itself forward as the more popular option, having reached 165.5K Peak Viewers during the announcement of the new World of Warcraft expansion.
The official PlayOverwatch YouTube and Twitch channels were also present in this ranking, thanks to the Overwatch World Cup which reached its finale in the same convention hall as BlizzCon. The 2023 World Cup was the most popular event for Overwatch in 2023, and you can read more about the viewership for this tournament in the respective Esports Charts article.
Read also: Overwatch World Cup 2023 was the most popular event of the year for the discipline
American community members were the most popular of the remaining channels, with sodapoppin, EsfandTV, and LIRIK all appearing in the middle of the top 10. As we saw in the previous graphic, Spanish and French were two of the four languages to achieve major watch time throughout the event, and these communities were represented by Spanish elxokas (27.6K PV) and Frenchmen ZeratoR (26.4K PV).
In terms of Hours Watched, the rankings are quite similar. Zackrawrr reigned supreme with 1.69M Hours Watched throughout the weekend event, followed by the official Blizzard channels. The Twitch account for PlayOverwatch managed to achieve almost the exact same watch time as the Blizzard Entertainment YouTube Live account, falling just slightly short.
New Zealander live-streamer Quin69 was live on both days of the BlizzCon event, reaching 236K Hours Watched for his two streams. The creator was quite popular but was not able to rank within the top 10 channels by Peak Viewers, having achieved 22K PV.
South Korean creator Jinnytty is a well-known IRL streamer and she achieved 129K HW thanks to her coverage of BlizzCon from the event floor. Her strolls around the venue were not as popular as streams by other creators in this ranking, but she made up for this by streaming for an average of 12 hours each day of the event. Her Saturday stream of the end of BlizzCon was slightly more popular, having reached 6.95K PV. Although her coverage of the latter day was more popular, this was different for the event overall.
Looking at the viewership received by the event on a daily basis, Friday was by far the most popular day of the event. On the first day of the event, BlizzCon 2023 received 4.86M Hours Watched in total, more than half of its total watch time.
Sunday was not an official day of BlizzCon, as it ended Saturday night. However, many streamers continued their streams revolving around BlizzCon late into the night, and the streams crept into Sunday morning. After midnight, 1.17M additional hours of watch time were generated for the BlizzCon 2023 event.
With all of this in mind, how does BlizzCon compare to other conventions and special events held during the final few months of 2023? BlizzCon 2023 was one of the most-watched conventions on Twitch, and the total number of channels covering the convention was almost the same as the amount to cover TwitchCon Las Vegas 2023.
Read also: Game shows, marriage, and more — most popular content and viewership of TwitchCon Las Vegas 2023
BlizzCon 2023 received 2.7M Hours Watched more than TwitchCon Las Vegas 2023. Highly impressive, considering that TwitchCon is a convention that is largely intended to be streamed by both in-person attendees and streamers reacting to the panels and announcements from home. Compared to other special events we have recently covered, such as Miss Grand International 2023, the Ballon d’Or, and even the first three days of Starfield’s release, BlizzCon 2023 was the most-watched of these select events.
Blizzard continues to command huge respect and viewership in the live-streaming industry, whether it's through their videogames like Diablo IV — which was one of the most-watched game releases of 2023 on Twitch, or their yearly conventions. If you want to look at the viewership of BlizzCon for yourself, use the Streams tab to search for streams during the BlizzCon weekend with BlizzCon in the title.
