Comparing These Stats

As per the stats above, it can be seen that both the number of the average and peak concurrent viewers have continued to grow each year, with the jump between 2017 and 2018 being especially large.

Plain and simple, this is definitely a sign of healthy growth (obviously). The two main criteria I look at when deciding how well an esport is performing is simply how many consistent viewers its main tournaments get, and by how much these tournaments grow or wither compared to their predecessors in terms of viewership. And since the Overwatch World Cup appears to be achieving both of these, it’s hard to argue that this tournament isn’t faring successfully.

However, those with keen eyes may have noticed that there was actually a drop in the total time watched in 2017 compared to 2016.

So what does this mean? Upon first inspection, this may jump out at you as an indication of a loss of interest, as this appears to represent a decrease in watch time despite an increase in overall viewers. This might be the result of the 2017 tournament failing to keep viewer’s interest despite drawing in a larger crowd. And yet, this is not the case.

As you can see, the 2016 World Cup offered more than double the amount of watchable content that the 2017 World Cup offered. So could the drop in total watch time actually be because there was simply less content to watch? Well, let’s take a look.

Below is a graph denoting the (average) amount of hours watched by viewers for each hour of content streamed from the tournament. In other words, how many times each hour of the tournament was watched by viewers.

And as you might’ve guessed, the decrease in the actual size of the 2017 tournament is the exact reason for the drop in total watch time. This isn’t the only thing we can take away from this graph, however, as it can also be seen that there was an increase in the (average) amount of hours viewed per hour streamed.

Thus, it can be concluded from these statistics that the annual Overwatch World Cup is gaining more attention and viewership each year — consequently growing as competition with each tournament.