A month into the NBA 2K League regular season, and the audience figures seem disappointing. Each episode of the fourth installment of LeBron v. the Warriors in the NBA Finals is, of course, pulling in millions of viewers. In the last week of May, the Overwatch League, one of the NBA 2K League’s big competitors, counted more than seven million total views, with 136,000 viewers tuning in at the same time. In comparison, the NBA 2K League had just 400,000 total views, and a peak of 6,000 concurrent viewers.
The league, though, seems unfazed. Several NBA 2K League team employees told me that the league’s primary focus and early indicators of success are not actually based on its concurrent streaming numbers.