Overwatch Twitch streamers flock to Apex Legends amid content drought

Many of Overwatch’s top Twitch streamers are jumping ship to Apex Legends, citing a lack of new content in Blizzard’s hero-based FPS as the reason for their departure.

While many of the big Overwatch streamers do still play the game, as that’s how they grew their audience to begin with, Apex has become a major part of their routine in recent weeks.

Events – Overwatch’s big content drops throughout the years – have gotten stale over time, as the only new additions to them have been skins and other cosmetics while the modes haven’t evolved.

For instance, for the second year in a row, the Archives event disappointed, as it only featured the same three missions in basically their original iterations without adding anything new aside from cosmetics.

Additionally, the game’s latest hero, Echo, was released back on April 14, 2020 and no new characters or competitive maps have been added to the game since.

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Meanwhile, Apex Legends has been continuously pumping out new content and characters. Now, with Season 9 making headlines, the gap between the two games in terms of audience investment has widened immensely.

Over on Twitter, streamer Gale Adelade posted a side-by-side of Apex and Overwatch’s Twitch viewership showing a mere 7.9K people watching the latter – while over 170K were tuned into Apex Legends.

“Hey Blizzard, can we get what they’re getting? Content is pretty Pog ya know?” he sarcastically captioned the post.

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Others have made it very obvious that Overwatch’s lack of content is why they’re streaming Apex so often. Top 500 tank player Flats mocked “playing game with new content” to advertise his Apex stream on Twitter.

Fran, one of the most popular female Overwatch streamers, started posting Apex Legends videos to her YouTube channel. The same can be said for Stylosa at Unit Lost, who has started uploading more Apex videos despite being an Overwatch YouTuber.

With Overwatch 2 still in development and no release date set, this trend could very well continue going forward. Blizzard didn’t reveal that many new details about the game at BlizzCon aside from some new maps, so fans have been in the dark for quite some time.

• Read More: Apex Legends clamps down on “smurfing” in Season 9 

That said, Overwatch’s new Game Director Aaron Keller has teased large new features will be coming to the game soon, but didn’t share what these new features and systems would be.

https://twitter.com/FRANA_OW/status/1389248386579279876

One possibility is a supposed clan system that was actually leaked at BlizzCon, but it’s unclear if that is a feature coming to Overwatch 2 or the base game.

In any case, we’ll have to see if they’re big enough to keep more of the game’s top streamers from jumping ship.