At 133K average viewership across all three language channels, the Overwatch League (OWL) Stage Three opens to a smaller online audience than previous stages.

At 721K total hours watched, day four of Stage Three was the lowest of the week. Two out of the three matches on both Friday and Saturday ended quickly with 4-0 sweeps.

The first day of Stage Three saw the week’s highest peak viewership of 163K. The mark was hit during the first game, featuring Shanghai Dragon’s new Korean players—including female competitor Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon. new Korean players—including female competitor Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon.

After a week’s break following the Stage Two playoffs, the OWL returned with the lowest viewership for a stage opening thus far. The average concurrent viewership for day one of Stage Three was 133K, a decrease of 16.88% from Stage Two (160K) and 62.9% from Stage One (358K).

The introduction of Twitch rewards at the beginning of Stage Two helped to boost viewership on opening day, but without a similar incentive to kickstart Stage Three, the viewer fatigue in OWL is starting to show. If this halt in Stage-on-Stage growth continues up until the postseason, it would be a worrisome sign for those who invested $20M in their OWL franchise slots, as well as the various sponsors—which includes non-endemic brands Toyota and Sour Patch Kids.

When taking total hours watched into consideration, the downward trend of viewership is largely the same. In total, last week accrued roughly 3.1M total hours watched—the fourth lowest for a single week thus far. This can be partly attributed to the fact that there was less Overwatch overall to sit through. On both Friday and Saturday, two out of the three matches played ended in 4-0, clean sweeps for the victors. This means no tiebreaker was required, and matches were kept as short, resulting in less overall broadcasting time.

While peak viewership for the week also fell well below that of the previous Stage, there were some interesting highlights. First, the highest point of viewership occurred on Wednesday, during the Stage Three opening match between Shanghai Dragons and Dallas Fuel . While the two were respectively the lowest and third lowest ranked teams in the standings in Stage Two, it was the first time viewers saw Shanghai Dragon’s newest Korean player additions (until now the team has been comprised entirely of Chinese players). It was also the OWL debut for Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon, the first female competitor in the league.

On day three of last week, there was also a slight uptake in peak viewership for the Korean broadcast, which reached a max CCV of 29K. This is still small in comparison to the English coverage, but was nevertheless the second highest peak viewership on the Korean stream, over the course of the entire season. Unsurprisingly, this uptake occurred during Seoul Dynasty’s match against San Francisco Shock, which Dynasty—the only team representing a Korean city—won 4-0.

The data in this article was collected from TEO Audience Insights. You can learn more about the platform and discover more streaming stats yourself by clicking here.