NYXL victory against Boston Uprising in Stage 3 playoffs reaches peak viewership of 162K.

Playoffs day achieved average concurrent viewership of 144K—a 20.3% decrease compared to the playoffs for Stage 2.

May 16th will mark the start of Stage 4, the last before the Overwatch League post-season and championship playoffs.

Last week marked the conclusion of the Overwatch League (OWL) Stage 3, which saw an overall lower average viewership than both stages before it. The New York Excelsior , the current highest ranked team in the league, achieved a stage title victory for the second time running—adding another $100K to their total prize-pool earnings in the competition. Their final opponent, Boston Uprising (a team belonging to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft), is still on a 10-0 win streak in the regular season, with NYXL ending their overall 15-series win streak.

In viewership, this translated to 144K average concurrent viewership (CCV) for the play-offs day (the total across the English, French and Korean broadcasts). This is 20.3% lower than the average CCV for the Stage 2 play-offs, which totaled 174K. It was around 20K higher than the Stage One playoffs, however this followed a different format—in which both the final regular season games and title matches took place on the same day.

It should also be noted that the second day of Stage 3 Week 5 saw an average CCV of 73K, which would be the lowest of any day in the OWL to date.



In terms of total hours watched, the play-offs day for Stage 3 (totalled across all three language channels) was 781K. This was only around 90K lower than Stage 2, despite the fact there was an additional game played on the final day of Stage 3 (due to the fact that there were four top teams in the playoffs, instead of three).

In total there were three games on the playoffs day, played in a tournament-style bracket format. All three were clean 3-0 sweeps, though it should be noted that the finals between NYXL and Boston Uprising had a tied map, meaning there were four games played instead of three.

When it comes to peak viewership, the audience maxxed during the finals between NYXL and Boston Uprising, at 162K. This was the second highest point of viewership for the stage, just below the Stage opening. It was however, 54K lower than the peak point of viewership for the Stage 2 finals, which reached 216K. While Stage 3 as a whole performed comparatively worse in terms of viewership next to the previous stage, the high average and max concurrent viewership demonstrate that the title matches can still reliably draw in a higher audience.

The final stage for the inaugural season will begin on May 16th. Some of the key matches for audiences to look out for are the ones that will influence the list of playoff teams, such as the loss that ends Boston Uprising’s regular season win-streak, and the (possible) end to Shanghai Dragons poor league performance—which at 0-30, has already been added to multiple lists of the worst losing streaks in sporting history.

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.