The new Overwatch 2 PvP beta dropped this week and it’s safe to say that players were excited. With a change to 5v5, a new hero, and character changes, the sequel provided players with some fresh content. The original Overwatch, released almost 6 years ago in 2016, has stayed in the top 30 games on live streaming for the past few years. It has remained a popular first person shooter, especially since the inauguration of the Overwatch League in 2018.
Before the release of the new beta, Overwatch was seeing an average of about 350k hours watched a day across Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Facebook Gaming. However, during the first day of release on April 26th and throughout the drops on the 27th, the game garnered 15 million hours watched across all platforms, with a peak viewership of 1.6 million.
Activision Blizzard planned an extensive Twitch drops event for the 27th, coordinating with over 200 streamers to give out game keys to viewers who watch 4 hours or more of content. The top 5 most popular streamers of Overwatch 2 on the first day of release were all sponsored with drops. xQcOW took the top spot with 2.7 million hours watched and a peak concurrent viewership of 312k viewers.
A_Seagull came in second place with 851k hours watched and almost 150k peak concurrent viewers.
mL7support, Asmongold, and AlphaCast also made the top 5 Overwatch 2 channels during the beta drops.
The Overwatch 2 beta closes on May 17th. It will be interesting to see the excitement for the full release of the game on live streaming, now that players have had a chance to test it out. Either way, the beta has been a popular release and has given some live streamers their most popular streams of the year so far.
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