BlizzConline celebrated the 30th anniversary of Blizzard Entertainment last weekend. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event was held online; only announcements of new games and add-ons took place there, while traditional esports events were canceled. Nevertheless, BlizzConline attracted almost 1.5 million viewers.
Key announcements: from Diablo II remaster to more Overwatch 2 details
Perhaps the main announcement of BlizzConline was the Diablo II remaster under the subtitle Resurrected. Players will receive 3D graphics with 4K resolution support and improved sound, as well as videos recreated from scratch. The game will be released in 2021.
Diablo fans expected the announcement of closed beta test start, but this did not happen. But Blizzard announced the fourth class of the future game: Rogue. Fans of the original should be excited as this class was not present in the second and third parts of the series.
Fans of Hearthstone have learned the details of the next expansion Forged in the Barrens and the plans of the developers for the Year of the Gryphon. The game will also get a new singleplayer roguelike mode called "Mercenaries", where characters from the Warcraft universe will participate in tactical battles.
Several announcements have been dedicated to World of Warcraft. Namely, Chains of Domination update will be released in WoW: Shadowlands with a new raid and dungeons; Burning Crusade will also be launched on WoW: Classic servers.
There was no Overwatch 2 at the opening ceremony, but the developers dedicated a separate broadcast to it. Blizzard shared some news about PvP and PvE modes, showed several gameplay videos, but did not name the release date of the game: and this is unlikely to happen this year.
The event was eagerly awaited by fans of the company's games around the world, the excitement on the broadcasts was huge both on Twitch and YouTube. How many people watched BlizzConline streams at peak?
BlizzConline viewership stats
BlizzConline was held online for two days, with a total airtime of about nine hours. However, the first day of the event attracted the most viewers, as the majority of the announcements took place that day.
The event attracted 1,497,317 spectators at its peak, which happened at the very beginning of the opening ceremony. The main platform was Twitch with 990.5K Peak Viewers: this is 50% more than YouTube's peak (498K Peak Viewers). Streams also took place on Facebook and VK Live, and the Russian social network surpassed FB by peak viewers (6.4K vs 2.2K).
BlizzConline outperformed the latest BlizzCon offline event by peak viewers. The opening ceremony of the 2019 event gathered 1.26M simultaneous spectators, which is almost 16% less than the peak audience of the online event.
English-language streams became the most popular ones; they gathered over 967K Peak Viewers. This is 82% more than Spanish-language streams which were #2 (180.5K concurrent viewers).
The top 5 also includes French, Portuguese and Russian streams which gathered from 68.8K to 85.3K viewers at peak. Nine languages had over 10K viewers at peak, and the top 10 was closed by Czech streams, the total peak of which was 5.1 thousand simultaneous viewers.
The main BlizzConline stream was the broadcast, which took place on the main Blizzard Entertainment YouTube channel. At its peak, it gathered over 277K people. Note that only English-language broadcasts got to the top 5 channels.
Another YouTube stream got #2, which was the World of Warcraft channel. It was simultaneously watched by over 129K viewers. Another Blizzard channel dedicated to Overwatch got into the top 5 with 108K concurrent viewers at the broadcast.
It is noteworthy that two Twitch channels got into the top 5. Third place went to xQc with 112K concurrent viewers, and the fifth place went to sodapoppin, who gathered 59K fans that simultaneously watched the event.
Our social media pages will keep you updated on the most interesting streaming statistics. Do not forget to share your opinions and questions using our Discord server.
