Overwatch 2 just surpassed League of Legends and Dota 2 as last week’s most-watched Twitch game—and there’s a special reason why

Overwatch 2 is already a huge hit on Twitch.

In the last seven days, according to Twitch statistics website SullyGnome, Overwatch 2 was the most-watched game on Twitch with almost 31 million hours watched, surpassing League of Legends by more than 800,000 hours in the middle of the Worlds 2022 quarterfinals and Dota 2 by over 10 million hours while The International 11 playoffs unfold. The only category ahead of Overwatch 2 on Twitch is Just Chatting, unrelated to gaming.

Developer Blizzard Entertainment’s strategy of making the game free-to-play and sending two waves of Twitch Drops to viewers in the first few weeks of the game’s release are likely the key factors that boosted Overwatch 2’s numbers on the platform. The freshness factor of it being a new game, released just on Oct. 4 this year, also plays a huge role in viewers’ interest, who are likely to check out the game and see how it’s changed compared to its predecessor.

The return of former Overwatch streamer and professional player xQc to the game played a huge role in the game’s popularity on Twitch this past week. He was alone responsible for almost 5 million hours watched, behind only Fextralife’s 9 million hours. Other former Overwatch League players like Seagull and Sinatraa rank among the top streamers watched for the game in this period.

Overwatch 2 also appealed to streamers who weren’t used to streaming the game regularly. Summit1g, shroud, and aceu took advantage of the game’s early popularity to stream it to their audiences. Their streams gathered another 1.7 million hours watched collectively.

When we take a look at the bigger picture, things still look good for Overwatch 2 streams as a whole. In the last 30 days, the game falls behind League of Legends to take the third spot among all categories—both still behind Just Chatting—but Overwatch 2 still beats every other category on the platform with a whopping 126 million hours watched since its release.

For now, Blizzard is done with Twitch Drops for Overwatch 2, so this should make numbers drop in the upcoming weeks. Still, Blizzard seems to have been spot-on with the game for both streamers and the audience in this first month.