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Battleborn Player and Viewer Count Launch Numbers

Gearbox and 2K's Latest Starts Off Outside the Top 10

May 4, 2016 by

Gearbox Studio’s new online competitive shooter/moba mashup, Battleborn, didn’t have the hottest start with the game unable to crack the top 20 most played games within its first few hours on Steam. Once more gamers began rolling in over the span of Battleborn‘s official May 3rd release day, the new IP had a total of 196,518 players on Steam and 200,097 viewers on Twitch on Day 1.

Battleborn‘s second day on Steam remained fairly close to its prior launch day, pulling in 193,436 total players and indicating no major launch issues. However, interest in the game on Twitch saw a quick 63% decline with only 77,295 viewers on Day 2.

On Day 3, Battleborn‘s player count showed a more significant drop off with 162,497 players (-16%) and the Twitch numbers dwindled down to half of the previous day with only 40,761 viewers (-47%).

One reason for the relatively low numbers for Gearbox’s highly anticipated new title was competitor Blizzard’s move to launch their open beta for Overwatch on the same day as Battleborn‘s release. To put into comparison, on May 2nd, an hour after Battleborn unlocked it was ranked #12 on Twitch with only 7,119 viewers while Overwatch was ranked #3 with 46,807 viewers and had previously spiked as high as 70,078 viewers four hours earlier.

And while Battleborn did put a dent in Overwatch‘s viewer numbers an hour after its launch causing it to lose 19,331 viewers, at it’s lowest point, Blizzard’s open beta still remained at 3.5x the viewer count of Battleborn indicating that things are only going to get worse for Gearbox’s latest when Overwatch officially launches later this month.

Battleborn-Launch-Numbers-Graph 2016