Overwatch 2 kicked off its 9th season dubbed "Champions" yesterday, which brough major game update addressing balance and bug fixes. The event garnered attention from both gamers and streamers, leading to a 2-3 times increase in the game's Twitch viewership.
With the Champions update, a series of changes to abilities and hero characteristics were released, reworking Pharah's skills and improving the Junkertown map. Additionally, developers reset the competitive rating and reintroduced qualification matches. More details about the new features can be found on the official game website.
Overwatch 2 has long been absent from the top ten categories on Twitch, recently often falling outside the top 20. Before the start of Season 9, it typically garnered 300-400K hours watched per day, with an average viewership of 15-25K people in the category. At the same time, the number of channels at its peak remained at around 2.3K.
Following the start of Season 9, the game's viewership metrics roughly doubled: on the day of the update's release, the Overwatch 2 section accumulated 918K Hours Watched, with the average online viewership rising to almost 40,000 people, and the number of channels reaching 4,800+. The game's dynamic growth continued into the next day: on February 14th, the Overwatch 2 section was already among the top seven categories on Twitch in terms of total Hours Watched.
Interestingly, a major update for Overwatch 2 coincided almost simultaneously with the start of Apex Legends Season 20. On February 14th, both games showed very similar statistics on Twitch, occupying adjacent positions in the top rankings. As a promotion for the new season, Blizzard is also distributing Twitch Drops — until February 19th, Overwatch 2 fans can receive cosmetic items (such as the legendary Cybermonk Zenyatta skin, avatars, etc.) by watching 12 hours of streams from partner content creators.
On the day of the release of Season 9, the most popular streamers for Overwatch 2 were Flats and Emongg from the United States, as well as mL7support from Romania. They emerged as leaders both in terms of total Hours Watched and peak viewership.
Speaking of Overwatch 2's viewership statistics over time, there is a slight downward trend in 2024: average viewership has decreased by approximately 26%, and peak viewership by 13%. The game is less frequently accumulating over 500K hours watched daily, as it now mostly happens during significant events like the start of a new season.
