The Overwatch League season kicked off with an increase in total hours watched over last year on Twitch , but it failed to match the previous season’s average viewership totals.

Across three official OWL broadcasts (English, Korean, and French), live coverage of week one drew a total of 6.27M hours watched from Thursday to Sunday, up from 5.59M last year. However, a jump from 12 teams to 20 led to an increased number of matches in week one, and the league’s average concurrent viewership actually dropped year-over-year to 188K concurrent viewers, down from 237.6K.

The Overwatch League has also added a Portuguese-language broadcast this season, but viewership data was unavailable for the opening week.

While viewership from opening day (Thursday) boasted 1.6M hours watched with an average CCV of 188K, it wasn’t markedly better than any other day of broadcast. The day with the highest average CCV was Saturday with 197.9K, and Sunday was the day with the most hours watched at 1.7M hours watched.

Last year on day one, which was also a Thursday, was by far the most-watched day with 2M hours watched and an average of 358K CCV across all three channels.

For the alternative language streams, viewership was relatively low outside of a few exceptions. On the Korean-language stream, viewership peaked around the last match of Thursday and the final match of Sunday, likely because those contests included the league’s only team representing a South Korean city, the Seoul Dynasty .

The French-language channel viewership was predictably highest during the first couple of matches on Saturday. The Paris Eternal expansion team’s only match of the weekend was the second contest to be played on Saturday.

On the main Overwatch League channel, viewership peaked at 214.38K CCV mostly because of the first match of the season, which was a championship rematch between the Philadelphia Fusion and London Spitfire . Each day of coverage included at least one match that peaked above 200K CCV.

Sunday’s viewership hovered above 200K, while three consecutive best-of-five matches went all the way to a decisive fifth map. While the same happened on Friday when the Toronto Defiant edged out the Houston Outlaws , a pair of uncompetitive sweeps at the end of the day resulted in low viewership for the latter half of day two.

While Twitch remains the primary platform for measuring viewership habits of the core Western esports audience, it does not represent the totality of Overwatch League viewership. Fans can watch action on OWL’s official website, Battle.net, and MLG. Additionally, matches are streamed in China on Zhanqi.tv, NetEase CC, Bilibili, and Huya, and Blizzard also has a deal to broadcast matches on Disney-owned platforms including ESPN, ABC, and Disney XD.