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Overwatch League Picks Up 10 Million Viewers In First Week

The first week of competition was a big hit, it seems.

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Blizzard's highly touted and much-promoted Overwatch League, a professional eSports league dedicated to the game, had a very successful first week, it seems. Blizzard announced today that the league's first week of programming netted more than 10 million viewers.

The inaugural Overwatch League season started last week in Los Angeles with four days of matches between the 12 teams. The 10 million figure for people who watched the first wave of competition spans all networks, including Twitch, along with Activision's own MLG service. It also covers international partners such as ZhanQi TV, NetEase CC, and Panda TV in China.

Blizzard also pointed out that this number may be higher given that people watched the competition together, on the same screen, as is often the case with traditional sports. For Twitch and MLG alone, the Overwatch League streams reached a peak concurrent user record of 437,000 during the first-day battle between Dallas Fuel and Seoul Dynasty.

Tickets at Blizzard's Los Angeles Arena, where the competition took place, were sold out for the entirety of the first week, Blizzard said.

The Overwatch League's first season runs through June; playoffs begin in July. Week 2 is going on right now and continues through the weekend. You can see the full Overwatch League schedule here on the event's website.

By comparison, Sunday's NFC Divisional round NFL playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints picked up an incredible 34.5 million viewers. Of course, the NFL is an established league that has been around for decades, while the Overwatch League is just getting started.

Twitch reportedly paid $90 million to get the rights to stream Overwatch League matches. To celebrate the event's launch, an Overwatch update has added a bunch of new Overwatch skins. To learn more about Overwatch League, check out GameSpot's other coverage below:

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