Overwatch Breaks Into Twitch's Most-Watched Games of 2016

People like watching games almost as much as they like playing them: that’s the whole foundation of eSports, where the best and brightest compete, but it’s also the foundation behind Twitch, where that old-school satisfaction of watching a friend play a game is enhanced with an incomprehensible chatroom and spamming memes.

Regardless, every year, githyp releases a list of the games that people have watched on Twitch the most during that period. And for the past several years, that list has always been roughly the same: League of Legends, DOTA 2, Hearthstone, Counter-Strike GO, and Call of Duty. This year, however, there was a shakeup: and to no one’s surprise, Call of Duty was knocked out of the top five and replaced with… you guessed it, Overwatch.

Here’s the full listing:
1. League of Legends / 116,997 viewers per hour (#1 in 2015)
2. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / 59,730 viewers per hour (#2 in 2015)
3. Dota 2 / 56,127 viewers per hour (#3 in 2015)
4. Hearthstone / 53,820 viewers per hour (#4 in 2015)
5. Overwatch / 23,515 viewers per hour (new)
 
So League of Legends is still number one, but given how well-received Overwatch has been both critically and commercially, I suspect it’ll quickly climb the ranks and be a strong competitor. That said, League of Legends still dominated this year, getting twice as many total views (over a billion) as the next runner up, Counter-Strike: GO.

You can see all the interesting streaming stats at Githyp, if you’re interested.