Only eight teams played in over the course of two days of action in Dallas, Texas, as the Overwatch League 
held its first-ever homestand weekend, but that didn’t prevent the league from having its most-watched days of action in Stage Two so far on Twitch .
While a typical OWL weekend includes 4 days of action with most of the league’s teams playing at least one match, only a portion of the league traveled to Dallas for just eight games on Saturday and Sunday.
With the more condensed, lighter schedule average viewership and total hours watched on each day outperformed every other day so far in Stage Two. Despite a power outage in Dallas that stopped action for more than 40 minutes, Saturday averaged 138K concurrent viewers (including the league’s top alternate-language broadcasts). Sunday’s action wasn’t hindered by technical difficulties and averaged 148K CCV.
Overall the weekend produced 2.4M hours of live coverage on the main OWL channel and its top alternate-language broadcasts. While that figure is lower than all other weekends so far this year, with just two days of matches being played, each day this weekend had a higher hours watched total than any single day this stage.
Saturday had 1.13M hours watched for a short live pregame show that was followed by four matches, and Sunday’s four-match session outperformed that mark with 1.28M hours watched. For comparison, week four of Stage Two last year only produced 2.9M hours watched for four days of matches. The most-watched day of action for this week last year averaged 121K CCV.
As one might expect, with matches taking place in the Lone Star state, a Texas showdown attracted the weekend’s peak viewership figures. The Dallas Fuel defeated the Houston Outlaws in Sunday’s finale, and it wasn’t just the Texans in the venue that were interested in witnessing the two teams fight on their figurative home turf of Texas. The max CCV of the weekend of 164K on the main OWL channel came during the match, and no other game managed to peak any higher than 140K.
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 the 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.
