Mentioned in this article Games: Hearthstone

The latest card set expansion for Blizzard Entertainment’s online collectible card game Hearthstone has helped the title generate 10.3M hours watched on Twitch in its first full week since being released.

Rise of Shadows came out on April 9, and on the very next day, Hearthstone viewership on Twitch spiked to 2.5M hours watched, the highest single-day total for the game this year. The weekly surge was led by influencers Thijs Molendijk and Octavian “Kripparrian” Morosan who each managed to eclipse 1M hours watched over the seven-day period.

Blizzard releases three expansions each year with one coming in April, August, and December, and the most significant spikes in viewership for the game on Twitch in a given year come immediately following a new content release.

This past week’s release is down from last year’s April expansion, The Witchwood, that produced 15M hours watched for the first full week after its release. The day following the release was the most-watched day of 2018 for Hearthstone as the game reached 3.7M hours watched on April 13.

That release also saw three different streamers surpass the 1M hours watched mark during the following week. Molendijk recorded 1.2M hours watched, Morosan had 1.5M hours watched, and Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang hit 1.3M hours watched.

The 2018 August release, The Boomsday Project, also outperformed the first week of Rise of Shadows, but by a slimmer margin. The expansion helped Hearthstone record 11.8M hours watched from August 7-13. Rise of Shadows release did, however, help the game get more hours watched in one week than the release of last year’s December expansion, Rastakhan’s Rumble. That release saw Hearthstone post 9M hours watched from December 4-10.

This year-over-year decline is the continuation of a notable drop in Hearthstone viewership on Twitch from 2018. The game’s 332.12M hours watched for the year was down significantly from 2017 when the title had 410.99M hours watched. During the calendar year, Morosan, Hearthstone’s most-watched streamer for 2018, recorded 22.5M hours watched playing the game, down from 27.22M hours watched in 2017.