Overwatch League Begins with Overwhelming Support

The Overwatch League began its inaugural season on January 10, which featured three highly anticipated matches. The viewer numbers for the opening night were extremely promising, as the opening night accumulated over 10 million viewers. This event is a huge sign for the future of mainstream eSports.

The Stats

The night peaked at just over 400,000 viewers at a single time, and never showed any less than 125,000 viewers during the matches. This is a higher total than the amount of viewers during the opening week NFL Thursday Night Football game. After seeing these numbers, it seems imminent that eSports will be going mainstream in the near future.

Results

As expected, the Los Angeles Valiant were absolutely dominant. They played the first match of the night, in which they swept the San Francisco Shock 4-0. Shortly afterwards, another Los Angeles team performed just as well. The second match of the night was a match up between the Shanghai Dragons and Los Angeles Gladiators. This game resulted in another 4-0 sweep, in favor of Los Angeles. The last match up of the night, and arguably most anticipated, featured the Dallas Fuel, and the South Korean squad, Seoul Dynasty. Seoul took the very close match in a 2-1 victory. This final match concluded which could turn out to be the most consequential night in esports as of yet.

The Overwatch League schedule can be viewed here.