In January 2018, Activision Blizzard signed a 2-year deal with Amazon’s Twitch and made their esports streams exclusive to the platform. This January, that deal expired, and Blizzard signed another – this time, with the streaming platform YouTube.
Streaming games
Their new multi-year deal with Google covers more than just their streaming rights, though those definitely impact esports fans the most. They’ve also made changes to the way they run their online play.
From now on, all of Activision Blizzard’s esports live events will be streamed on YouTube. Currently, Activision actively supports six different esports titles – Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Warcraft 3: Reforged and StarCraft 2. Among these are some of the biggest esports titles in the world – and that means a fairly significant change for esports audiences.
So far, Twitch has dominated the streaming world almost exclusively, although platforms like Mixer and YouTube have tried to put a dent in their monopoly – so far, without much success. This new deal, however, suggests that this is no longer the case.
With a giant like Blizzard and their proprietary esports headed exclusively to YouTube, Twitch is going to lose out on a lot of revenue, and with it, viewers. They have so far been fairly quiet about this change, while both Activision Blizzard and YouTube have spoken favorably about the recent change.
Pete Vlastelica, CEO of Activision Blizzard Esports said:
“This is an exciting year for Activision Blizzard Esports as we head into the inaugural season of Call of Duty League and our first ever season of homestands for Overwatch League all around the world. It’s our mission to deliver high-quality competitive entertainment that our fans can follow globally, live or on-demand, and to celebrate our players as the superstars that they are. This partnership will help us deliver on that promise at new levels, by combining our passionate communities of fans and players with YouTube’s powerful content platform and exciting history of supporting next-generation entertainment.”
Other changes
In addition to the streams themselves, Activision Blizzard is going to make a few more changes. The biggest of them is that from now on, they will be using the Google Cloud as the infrastructure base for their games. That means that their players will connect using this service.
According to the announcement, this change is supposed to lead to less lag for players using the services, and also allow Activision to perform more advanced data analysis in order to improve their games. The latter promise is a bit vague, of course, but most players would certainly be happy with decreased lag.
The first event
The very first event was already streamed under this new agreement: The Call of Duty League kick-off last weekend. It was the first in a series of many – the biggest of which is the Overwatch League. One of the biggest and most watched channels on Twitch, the event series is now moving to YouTube as well.
That could really impact Twitch’s viewer numbers – and they are already on the decline, compared to YouTube’s, which were increasing even before this new deal was announced. While Twitch won’t lose its top spot any time soon, YouTube poses a considerable threat to the platform’s esports viewership numbers, and thus also its income.
