It was pretty obvious that the e-sports bubble is just that… a bubble. When the entire focus is on trying to find ways to exclude the core gamer in hopes of luring in casual viewers who regularly watch major league sports, you know it’s not going to turn out well. Well, that’s exactly what happened after the hype and mainstream media luster of first week coverage wore off for the Overwatch League.
DBLTap spotted a tweet from The Esports Observer that leads to a breakdown of the League’s first and second week numbers, and it appears that courting casuals is fleeting as far as engagement is concerned, and relying on pushing “diversity” and “inclusion” as selling points to the Social Justice Warrior crowd wasn’t enough to maintain more than a peak average of 75,000 viewers.
As depicted in the chart below, the numbers don’t lie and the numbers are saying that well over half of its viewers did not tune back in during the second week of the League’s broadcasts via streaming services.
The report doesn’t make any new observations most people wouldn’t have already picked up just by looking at the League from the outside.
The only significant reports to come out of the event were two dueling stories for attention-grabbing hot takes about sexism and homophobia, leading most hardcore gamers to roll their eyes and casual viewers to scoff off to something worthwhile for their entertainment whims.
In a way to suture the proverbial viewership bleeding impressions, the report from the Esports Observer tries to compare the lower end of the averages of the first week with the upper end of the averages of the second week. So 109,000 on the average of the first week doesn’t look anywhere near as bad when compared to 75,000 from the upper end of the second week.
It’s a lot less shocking than peaking at 180,000 off the top of the first week going down and bottoming out at around 69,000 or 70,000 during the second week, where more than 110,000 viewers noped out of the broadcast streams during the second week of the Overwatch League’s airing.
One thing that the Esports Observer couldn’t deny was that viewership retention is the name of the Overwatch League’s game from here on out. If week three fails to retain week two’s numbers, Blizzard’s high-profile, big-budget venture into e-sports will be a failure. The site states…
“Not only has the hype worn off, but there remains a concern that watching Overwatch esports is difficult for non-players to spectate, and audience members with less knowledge of the game were not likely to return week after week.”
When the company puts political correctness and fringe diversity agendas ahead of their hardcore base having fun, they’ve already excommunicated their hardcore base. And when casuals have a hard time making heads or tails of a a screen filled with enough visual effects to give the average person the impression that the HUD has a bad case of diarrhea, it’s nothing but an uphill climb from there to find some middle-of-the-road audience who is both enticed by electronic sporting events and doesn’t mind SocJus pandering. However, according to consumer trends and sales data, that doesn’t appear to be a very large audience at all.