Is Overwatch Dying Off?

Overwatch will be two years old on the 24th, but is two years long enough for this game to lose the amazing momentum it once had? While we don’t have access to the number of concurrent Overwatch players. There are things we can look at and speculate what the current situation is.

I am going to preface that this is speculation and not definite fact. The amount of viewers are not synonymous with the amount of people playing these games, just a way I choose to gauge their popularity.

Over the course of five days, I looked at the amount of people watching several different games on Twitch; Overwatch, Fortnite, Playerunknown's Battle Ground, and League of Legends. I looked at the number of viewers 3 times throughout the day, 8 am, 12 pm, and 4 pm and averaged it for each day. I then took those averages and averaged them to get these numbers. All the averages are appropriately rounded to the nearest whole number.

Date	Overwatch Viewers	Fortnite Viewers	PUBG Viewers	League of Legends Viewers
May 12th, 2018 Average	21,117	107,423	45,973	222,681
May 13th, 2018 Average	35,238	109,276	59,999	231,586
May 14th, 2018 Average	35,973	281,300	30,001	97,720
May 15th, 2018 Average	18,821	88,509	47,862	275,310
May 16th, 2018 Average	12,688	111,260	72,151	91,446
Total Average	24,767	139,554	51,197	183,749

These numbers show Overwatch’s dwindling numbers compared to other games that are drawing in massive crowds on Twitch. Battle Royale games have taken a very large market share of streamers and their audience.

This can also been seen in other ways, not only by monitoring Twitch streams. Clip shows on YouTube that showcase fun bits of games that people are playing can be a decent way to gauge what people are playing the most of.

In shows like Kotaku’s Highlight Reel, you can see how, overtime, there have been less Overwatch clips and more clips from Battle Royale games.

A reason for this change in streamers and viewers is that Battle Royale games, Fortnite in particular, may be better to stream than Overwatch.

With Overwatch, it can take a while to get into a match, which is time where the streamer has to riff and can be difficult. When the streamer gets into the game, they may be entirely focused on the game and playing their best and end up begin silent or ignoring their chat.

With Battle Royale games, there is little wait time to get into a match. The wait time to get into a match is a good amount of time for the streamer to interact with the chat without having to riff. And there are occasional moments of down time during the match where the streamer may be hiding in a building and look at the chat during the game.

I think that Overwatch’s community may be losing more and more players each day, but I don’t think that it’s going to die just yet. And with the 2 year anniversary coming up, I think there may be some more life breathed into the game.