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New Esports League Draws Over 400,000 Concurrent Viewers

Morning Report: It’s like HQ Trivia. Only you watch other players play. And instead of questions, you have guns. And instead of HQ Trivia, it’s called Overwatch.

The launch of the Overwatch League, a new esports competition for the eponymous game is off to a cracking start. According to various esports observers, early viewer numbers for the league’s debut were strong.

According to esports veteran Rod Breslau for example, the numbers were impressive:

Other reports put the figure at 415,000, or just a few less. Regardless, the numbers imply that the Overwatch League has a fighting chance. (The actual numbers, inclusive of all sources, imply a higher aggregate number, but the above Twitch numbers are good enough for directional scale.)

Overwatch, a shooting game from Blizzard (the folks behind the Starcraft and Diablo franchises), launched in 2016, drives material revenue. Reporting from VentureBeat earlier this year, for example, pegged Overwatch revenue at $1 billion and growing.

(Overwatch is the “eighth Activision Blizzard game to generate $1 billion in revenue,” VentureBeat noted.)

Of course, Blizzard is not the first games company to take a popular title into the esports realm. Riot Games’ League of Legends became an esports powerhouse in its own right, for example.

And all the above brings us back to the interesting bet that Amazon made in 2014 to buy Twitch, the leading esports streaming company.

From The Crunchbase Daily:

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