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Overwatch 2’s Beta Lost 99% of Its Viewers in Just the First Week on Twitch

Draugoth

Gold Member
Overwatch_2_perdeu_99_audiencia_Twitch.jpg


The Overwatch 2 beta launched last week, a pivot of the original plan for the game which was going to be a grand release of both a multiplayer overhaul and single player content. But Blizzard has decided the multiplayer revamp needed to be pushed live sooner so the game can go back to getting updates again, and for a moment there, it looked like Overwatch was set to have a massive resurgence in popularity.

But a week makes quite a difference, and gamers have a short attention span if they’re not kept engaged. Overwatch 2 absolutely shattered records with 1.5 million concurrent viewers on Twitch, boosted partially by people wanting to check out more or less every big name streamer on the platform playing the game, while others were motivated by beta access drops that were going on during streams, so they could get in themselves.
 

//DEVIL//

Member
I really liked the beginning of overwatch where it was fun . Then it turned to mainly loot boxes that are just very frustrating and so much modes added the game is no longer fun
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
They used twitch drops as the main way to distribute keys, forcing people to watch 4 hours of streams to inflate their numbers so they could make a press release of how excited everyone is for headlines. They missed a trick though, had they rationed out new rewards such as exclusive skins they could of kept the artificially high number.

Of course they didn't so lol we can see it for what it really is, Overwatch in all its generic glory.
 
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STARSBarry

Gold Member
Because they're calling it "2", when it really is nowhere near the expectations of what a sequel is. As far as I know, no one is excited about it. If anything, maybe a few are content.

I think this is unfair, I think the extremely limited additional content that you can barely tell the diffrence from classic Overwatch is well within the expectations of what modern Blizzard are capable of producing as a sequel.

It would be far more surprising for them to deliver anything of value.
 

Holammer

Member
Streamers don't work for free anymore. Time for AB to open the wallet, again.
It'll get another push when (and if) they make the beta more open. There's artificial access scarcity now.
 

Filben

Member
If the only incentive is to get beta access keys and that's how you want to achieve viewers and be judged... who would have thought.

Ultimately it seems it's still Overwatch and, apart from the PvE mode, it seems more like balancing 2.0 than a real successor. So if you're done with it or wasn't interested in OW1 there's probably not enough change.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
game is fucking dead

period
It's not.

It's still more popular than Sea of Thieves and SoT gets routine updates because it's profitable.

Blizzard probably views it as a small money maker so they're setting it up to coast for the foreseeable future.

No one can be surprised by the precipitous viewer count drop if you were even half paying attention to it's viewer numbers over the last couple of years.
 
Seems like this could have just been DLC rather than trying to make a second game and splitting your playerbase. Seems kinda daft.
 

nikos

Member
Of course it did. Big streamers were sponsored to stream the game and people wanted beta keys. We're playing the game now.

There are more drops this weekend with the Overwatch League, so it will probably spike a bit but not as much.

You'd think Forbes would know how numbers worked, but I suppose they had to write about something.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
Seems like this could have just been DLC rather than trying to make a second game and splitting your playerbase. Seems kinda daft.

It's not splitting the player base.

Overwatch owners upgrade to OW2 for free.

The Overwatch 2 branding almost certainly does a better job at gathering player interest than simply calling it Overwatch: Endgame or something similar.

Calling it Overwatch 2 might damage the Overwatch brand long term, but Blizzard doesn't seem to care about that.
 

ANDS

King of Gaslighting
We sure do love clickbait articles when they go against something we like.

. . .seriously though, what did people expect the numbers to do? The promotion for access did exactly what it was meant to do: advertise that OW was getting an update and get people into the game to try it out. The game is now BACK to the viewership levels pre-promotion. It did exactly what it was intended to do.
 

Hari Seldon

Member
We sure do love clickbait articles when they go against something we like.

. . .seriously though, what did people expect the numbers to do? The promotion for access did exactly what it was meant to do: advertise that OW was getting an update and get people into the game to try it out. The game is now BACK to the viewership levels pre-promotion. It did exactly what it was intended to do.
Lol being back to the pre-promotion levels means that it failed spectacularly. They could have had the exact same numbers doing no promotion at all lol.
 
Never got the appeal myself. Seeing this drastic fall off doesn't surprise me. It's fairly typical of all these Twitch promotional streams. The same happened with Lost Ark too.
 

Bragr

Banned
It was just a glorified loot haul, where viewers tune in to multiple streamers and try to get a drop. It's always like that with drops, it's not a real reflection of the game's popularity.

Overwatch 2 is uninspired and a cash grab, it's worse than Anthem.
 

ANDS

King of Gaslighting
Lol being back to the pre-promotion levels means that it failed spectacularly. They could have had the exact same numbers doing no promotion at all lol.

So Blizzard's main goal. . .was to increase Twitch viewership? Seems like a silly thing to waste money on, but you're the expert on marketing.
 

Kacho

Gold Member
The game was highly questionable from the start so this isn’t surprising. The time for Overwatch has come and gone.
 

Jennings

Member
It looks the same as Overwatch with nothing interesting to set it apart. This is an issue of people already being tired of the same old same old for the last 6 years.
 
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01011001

Banned
to be fair, xQc streamed it in the first week, and he drew in 300k viewers alone, with a normal stream of him usually hanging around 70k concurrent viewers.

so basically when he doesn't stream the game loses 70k viewers just like that
 

jaysius

Banned
Anyone with half a brain called out these inflated due to keygating numbers.

Twitch is such a shitty metric, between all the fucking bots that they turn a blind eye to and all the shitty spam text, I'm not sure what fucking chump pays a sub fee to a twitch streamer in 2022. I understand less the people that throw $50-$100 at them DAILY on a regular basis.
 

Shubh_C63

Member
Lets be honest, the game will never be dead-dead, but holy shit what have they been doing all these years.
I thought OW2 was got to have PvE modes.
 

Kacho

Gold Member
Lets be honest, the game will never be dead-dead, but holy shit what have they been doing all these years.
I thought OW2 was got to have PvE modes.
It does. The PVE content isn’t in the beta and if you own OW1 you get access to OW2 PVP for free.
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
Why would people watch a beta after checking it out? How does this translate into success or failure? I have no clue because I don't watch game streams.
 

Belthazar

Member
Those "records" were basically manufactured by Blizzard paying big streamers to play the game in the initial week, but people and streamers dropped off big time when they figured out it was just the same game again.

There's just no interest for what they have to offer right now and this early release of nothing might just poison the well around the discourse for the game when/if it actually launches something new.
 

GymWolf

Member
well, you don't have to watch it... just keep the stream open ok your phone lol.

I had it in a small window off to the side on my phone lol
I guess you are right.

I only care about the pve part so the beta didn't interested me at all.
 

Shubh_C63

Member
It does. The PVE content isn’t in the beta and if you own OW1 you get access to OW2 PVP for free.
By PVE modes I mean proper GAAS campaign, maybe like Destiny where they throw segments of the story each week.
Have they showed something like this for Ow2.
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
By PVE modes I mean proper GAAS campaign, maybe like Destiny where they throw segments of the story each week.
Have they showed something like this for Ow2.

They haven't really shown anything but that trailer for PvE from years ago, suffice to say its closer to the small horde mode seasonal events than it is Destiny.

Also most games have a campaign, just GaaS ones tend to have terrible ones full of filler to string you along to the next paywall, so personally I'm not hoping for that.
 
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