When the Overwatch League formed, many esports organizations that failed to earn a spot in the franchised system exited the game and dropped their rosters. Growing speculation on social media by fans and players alike suggested that the middle tier of Overwatch esports would suffer, and potentially die off because of Blizzard’s monopoly.

However, with the league’s inception, a new minor league system was born, Overwatch Contenders, which is also run by Activision Blizzard . With many Twitch personalities leaving the game to stream a variety of different titles, the end of the Overwatch League season created a void in viewership for Overwatch on Twitch , and it started to regularly slip out of the top 10 chart for most-watched content.

While Contenders is largely a replacement of the second tier for competitive Overwatch, the official website for the league boasts a yearly prize pool of $3.2M that gets spread across all of its seven regions. In addition, the leagues serve as feeders for some OWL teams.

Initial reception of Contenders was timid from OWL franchises and only a few set up feeder teams, but now, about a year after the system was created, more than half of the teams in the North American region for Contenders are run by either OWL teams or esports organizations associated with OWL teams, like Team Envy and NRG Esports .

Since November, the Contenders season, which includes seven regions with 12 teams per region, has attempted to mitigate the gaping hole in Overwatch viewership on Twitch left by the OWL offseason to little success.

Throughout the season that started in November, the official Contenders Twitch channel has averaged just 3.29K concurrent viewers, and despite 281 hours of airtime, it hasn’t managed to hit 1M hours watched. But with playoffs ramping up over the past few weeks, the channel has managed to generate some buzz, and slightly higher viewership numbers, most notably in its North American region that has numerous OWL academy teams.

For the North American semi-finals and final matches, which included exclusively OWL feeder programs, sessions averaged between 6K-13K CCV. The finals of the North American Contenders season hit a max of 13.28K CCV averaging 9.28K.

Though those numbers aren’t comparable to the likes of high-profile influencers or the Overwatch League itself, the competition served as a way to whet the appetite of fans waiting for OWL to start next month. Much like Minor League Baseball or the NBA’s G League, trying to compare Contenders viewership to the league it feeds into is simply unfair.

With 1.95K hours of airtime, the official OWL channel on Twitch averaged 37.05K CCV in 2018 totalling 74.6M hours watched. The more appropriate comparison would be to another second tier league like the North American League of Legends Championship Series’ NA Academy league.

For the NA Academy summer split the finals averaged around 22K viewers over the course of close to 10 hours of coverage on Riot Games’ official Twitch channel. The event peaked at 43.7K CCV.

While those figures are significantly higher than that of Contenders, it’s worth noting how much more established League of Legends is as an esport relative to Overwatch, which just completed its first year as an esport with the inaugural OWL season.

Overwatch Contenders doesn’t pull much weight in the grand scheme for Overwatch in terms of viewership or esports, but the build up to its North American finals was able to leverage recognizable organizations (or at least their academy teams) and the excitement of bracket play to reel in at least some viewers.

From traditional sports to esports, competitive play in leagues that aren’t at the highest level are difficult to sell, but they’re also vital to a game’s ecosystem. Though Contenders was only able to provide an ever-so-slight boost to Overwatch’s reach in the past few weeks, the semi-pro league structure manages to serve its purpose by providing a landscape for the development of professional players as OWL continues to expand rapidly, with six new teams coming this season.