Through Activision’s partnership with Youtube, players can find themselves earning in-game rewards for Overwatch and Call of Duty. To earn these rewards, players have to watch live matches of the Call of Duty League on the official website or on the Call of Duty Companion app while also logged in to their Activision accounts. The rewards are said to include emblem, sprays, and animated calling cards (all transferable across different platforms). This change is probably because of the viewer number drop since the streams switched from Twitch to Youtube Gaming.

Starting Friday, May 29th the audience for the Overwatch League will be able to earn League Tokens by watching on the League’s official website or app while also logged into their Battle.net account. By gaining these tokens, players have the ability to use them in exchange for in-game items on any of the platforms. For console players however, they will also have to be linked to their Xbox Live, PlayStation, or Nintendo account while watching. The Overwatch League is also offering the same rewards for watching their exclusive Twitch streams.

While the Call of Duty League did not receive that much damage in viewership, the average number of those watching is actually rising (slowly). The real damage is shown with the viewership from the Overwatch League, which lost almost more than half of its original viewers throughout the seasons.

Overwatch League year on year average viewership statistics. There is a lot more going on than just the move to YouTube to explain this kind of drop off. pic.twitter.com/AlbNdBeIMs

— Richard Lewis (@RLewisReports) May 7, 2020

As drops are not a new concept when it comes to big games (such as Epic Games doing the same concept for The Fortnite World Cup on Youtube), Activision is hoping to see more engagement with their audience through this method as it seemed to have worked in the past for others. Riot Games has also tried this same concept with its popular shooter game Valorant.