Heart of the Swarm launch attracts 1.1m viewers

Blizzard's latest expansion to StarCraft 2, Heart of the Swarm, attracted over 1 million viewers for its live launch broadcast.

The company's 21-hour global broadcast saw the community responding with up to 125,000 concurrent viewers, according to broadcaster Twitch.

Likewise the company saw sales hit 1.1 million worldwide, including both digital and retail sales, while StarCraft 2 fever married over into last weekend's MLG Winter Championship in Texas, with over 157,000 peach concurrent viewers.

"StarCraft II has always been one of the most popular games on Twitch, and we've noticed a wave of new viewership since Heart of the Swarm launched last week," said Kevin Lin, COO of Twitch.

"Viewer numbers are up just about across the board for the most popular StarCraft II pro-gamers and personalities who stream on Twitch."

MLG boss Sundance DiGiovanni added: “Heart of the Swarm has generated even more excitement, and we're all looking forward to what the future brings for StarCraft II eSports.”

James Lee

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James Lee is a freelance writer and analyst with extensive experience in the technology, media and games sectors. For the past few years he has provided content for internationally published industry reports, SEO companies and a variety of news-focused websites. Prior to this, James was responsible for covering news and producing in-depth features for GamesIndustry.biz while occasionally contributing to its sister-site. Eurogamer.net. In addition to this he has contributed to other notable sites such as CVG.co.uk, Edge-Online and DigitalSpy.