Saying only 6% of players play stadium is kinda misrepresenting the numbers and what actually happend during the last year

Let me explain. Blizzard has always been incredibly quiet about the player numbers. We only got to hear about the numbers at launch and now when they decide to put Stadium on the backburner.

During Launch they said:

• Their goal was for stadium to make up around 10-20% of the player hours, at launch it was over 50% and has since dropped to around 40%. For comparison when a new event mode drops it usually peaks around 20% and can drop to as low as 2% by the end of the event.
• In pre-stadium OW, ranked and unranked role queue were the most popular modes and it’d fluctuate which is more popular, and after that third place was unranked open queue at around 8-10%
• During a normal play session on average one third of the players play at least one Stadium match

(Source: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/overwatch-stadium-aaron-keller-interview-summary/963792 )

Now they say 6% of players play this mode. (Source: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24289101/director-s-take-future-formats/ )

Sounds like we dropped from around 30% of players to 6% of players. This may be true but this doesnt tell the full story of what happened during the last year. Lets not forget the revival of Overwatch this February with one of the biggest patches of all time.

Lets look at what actually happend and put some context behind these numbers. Since we only have the steam numbers i will use these: https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570

Stadium Released in April 2025. As we can see by the player count Stadium didnt bring in any new players. It took existing players and pushed them to a new game mode. This is great for us players but just bad for business, since this means more work on more game mode, but no additional skin sales. It for sure helped player rentention tho.

They said i may that one third of the players played this mode: 33% of 40,006 Peak players is about 13.000 people. This was peak hype, peak new shiny thing phase.

Lets look at the numbers now. Overwatch is huge now and has 102,096 Peak players. 6% of that is 6.000 people.

So in reality the playerbaser just halfed from peak hype to now, which in my opinion is fair.

My conclusion from that:

The Spotlight in Stadium brought in over 100.000 people on steam, but these people where only brought in by 5 (+5) new heroes in core. All these people went to the core game modes of 5v5 and 6v6. Most of these people probably never even heard of stadium, because during the spotlight, the only meaningful things said about Stadium was 2 new heroes Ram and Cat (two of the most hated heroes of the time with cat having a 46% ban rate during this time) and the icon change which is by far the most hated change in Stadium history (just go over to the Stadium subreddit and sort by top)

All the new players went to core and all the existing players also went to core because they want to play the new heroes.

I honestly think that it is impressive that this mode stayed this relevant after alot of bad dev decissions.

Bad decissions:

• spending virtually 0 dollars on marketing for this mode. No sponsered streams after the launch. Everything is community managed by stadiumbuilds.io

• The icon change was way to early, alienated existing players and made it even harder for new players to get into it. They could have done it, when the mode had every hero added.

• Not putting the 5 new heroes into stadium. No returning or new player is even gonna try stadium if all the new stuff is in core

• Adding all the new heroes 2 months after release. It felt like this: Let the new overtuned heroes run havoc in core and let the community build up hatred for these heroes. Wait for ban rate to hit 40%. Now nerf them in core and release the equally overtuned in stadium, with now opportunity to ban that. This especially applies to hazard, freja and cat.

• right now only half of the roster has been added, so of course you are not gonna play this mode if your main isnt in it.

• Balance, Queue times and Matchmaking are a nuance issue and i dont wanna get into that in this post (you can read my opinion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/overwatch2/comments/1scqday/overwatch_stadium_released_nearly_one_year_ago/ )

Business side:

• Stadium was not sucessfull in garnering the attention of people outside of the overwatch bubble, which makes overwatch 0 money

• The Spotlight on the other hand drew in a huge amount of old players and new players. The old players returning is probably also the reason why they are trying to bring back 6 v 6

  • Side note from me as someone who is gm in core and hit champ in 6v6. I had to fill tank every game to get this rank, because this mode is filled with dps players. (im a support player) and i often had to solo tank. Noone wants to play tank ever.

• Blizzard is having layoffs right now, so they have to cut costs and this is probably the easiest to cut since this is not bringing in new players or selling skins.

Tldr:

• The numbers are not as bad as they are trying to make them look (ofcourse they have more data but i would love to see how the player numbers for each mode moved from the beginning of spotlight over the spotlight to now).

• Alot of bad decissions that the existing community didnt like

• They didnt even try to get all the new players to play stadium. They all these random events. Why not put the new heroes in core and stadium and make the players try the new hero in core and stadium. Missed opportunity in my opinion.

• way to slow with adding new heroes. They shake up of existing heroes felt unnecessary