Fears Over NBA2K Viewership, Latest Odds May 25

Let's face it, folks are loving this year's NBA Playoffs and NHL Playoffs more than ever before.  Bringing the eSports variant into play at this moment could make sense, but some are questioning the logic.  Viewership numbers may be proving the skeptics correct.

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The first major esports league to be owned and operated by a traditional sports organization, eSportsObserver noted the following:

During the Tip Off tournament, this appeared to be the case. Across the broadcasts (excluding reruns) for the tournament, the NBA 2K League earned just shy of 215K hours watched and just over 6.5K average concurrent viewers. In comparison, the Overwatch League Database Link averaged 213.2K concurrent viewers and earned over 5M hours of watch time during the initial broadcasts of its opening week.

The viewership has dropped off even more since.

eSportsObserver writes:

For the year to date, NBA 2K18 Database Link has earned 4.4M hours watched, making it the 64th most watched category on Twitch Database Link. By comparison, Psyonix’s Database Link racing-meets-soccer title Rocket League Database Link is the 28th most watched title, having earned 16.3M hours watched. FIFA 18 Database Link is 14th with 28.4M hours watched during the same time period.

Kspadetheprospect believes there is still time to get it all right following all the initial Draft hype.

"I Think the highest viewership for any of these games was 13,000 live viewers," he noted on his YouTube video below. "It sounds good but I don't know if 13,000 hits their projections.  I think that is on the low end.  You want to go higher than that.  Sadly, some of these games didn't even hit 10,000."

In fact, the days that followed, viewership didn't even reach 4000 with some of the games.

Bryan Wiedly of Sporting News expressed his concern:

Most alarming is that the viewership eroded from day one and continued to drop throughout the tournament, even as the games took on more importance. That suggests of the few with some curiosity about the competition, a good percentage that tuned in checked out for one reason or another and may never come back.

The Finals barely cracked the 7000 viewership mark.

Here are your betting odds for Friday night's matchups.

- Tyrone Black, Gambling911.com