Overwatch, Blizzard's widely popular hero shooter, seems to show no signs of slowing down. In fact, Overwatch League, the game's official global eSports league, has managed to pull the attention of 10 million devices to its streams in the first week alone.

Overwatch League kicked its first regular season off on January 10 and has already received record breaking traffic. The regular season consists of 12 city-based teams competing to win weekly stage titles and boost their records before the post season seeding.  The matches are played from Wednesday to Saturday each week, which means that Blizzard was able to gain its 10 million total views in only 4 days. These views are even more impressive given that the games only stream through three services: Blizzard's own website, the Major League Gaming website, and Twitch.

While 10 million is an impressive number, it may not even be the true total, as this number only counts the amount of devices connected to the various steams, which means that many more could have been watching.

Blizzard has a history of supporting eSports, giving a lot of attention to the Starcraft 2 and Hearthstone tournament scenes over the years. That said, this is easily the biggest push that the company has ever given to the competitive side of Overwatch. This tournament doesn't come without controversy, however.

After the first night of play, IGN interviewed several players about their least favorite character in the game. The resounding answer was that players would remove Mercy if given the chance, claiming that she is not fun to play against and that her resurrection ability makes the game unbalanced. The sentiment shared amongst most of the pro players was that resurrecting dead players takes all of the punishment out of losing a fight.

Even with the Mercy-run meta, viewers seem to be engaged and eager to see how these matches play out. The peak viewership for the event so far happened during the Dallas Fuel vs. Seoul Dynasty match on the first day, which reached a total of 473,000 viewers. While this record has yet to be beaten, the season is long, and post-season playoffs promise a larger audience.

Blizzard seems to be pouring its all into Overwatch League, and it has paid off so far. With Twitch's large viewer base, along with the 35 million people who play Overwatch, it seems that this tournament can only get bigger from here.

Overwatch is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: Game Informer