World of Warcraft Classic: Twitch's New Champion
The return of “WoW Classic” has made World of Warcraft the most watched title on Twitch. Just how big has it become, and what might it mean for the future?To get more news about
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Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is a touchstone for the MMORPG genre, and indeed online gaming in general. First launched all the way back in 2004, an entire generation of gamers have grown up playing the title, which has continued to grow, expand, and evolve over the near decade-and-a-half it has been live, during which time it has accrued more than 100 million registered users.
Many of those players have been around since the beginning, and as the game changed and grew around them, calls for an unaltered “original” version of the game have grown louder and louder among the community, and those calls were answered just under two years ago, when World of Warcraft Classic was first announced, and after a long wait, which included a closed beta beginning this past May, the original version of the game finally became publicly available on August 26th. The impact on the world of streaming has been enormous.
So just big has the return of the original version of the title been on Twitch, and what might it mean for the streaming landscape? Let’s dive into the numbers and break it all down.In the above graph, we can see the total Twitch viewership for World of Warcraft from the week prior to the original’s re-release up to the writing of this article (9/19/19). The impact is plainly obvious, with daily peak viewership increasing from an average below 100,000 viewers to an immediate high of nearly 1 million, and even after a few weeks still more than doubling its original numbers. But, it goes way beyond that single metric.
Since August 26th, World of Warcraft has accrued nearly 115 million hours of total viewership, more than any other game, with the next title, League of Legends, coming in at nearly half that amount. In the same number of days leading up to Classic’s release, League accrued nearly 68 million hours of total viewership, and that included its biggest competition of the year, The International. And while it has obviously slowed down since the incredible numbers of the first few days, World of Warcraft remains the most watched title on all of Twitch in our most recent weekly rankings. There’s no way around it: right now, there’s no bigger title in streaming than World of Warcraft.
The story of World of Warcraft Classic’s explosion is also the story of Asmongold, who was already the top WoW streamer on Twitch prior to the recent release. Before August 26th, that meant peak viewership, typically, between 30,000 and 40,000 audience members. On the day of release, that number jumped all the way to over 220,000, and has since he’s broken the 100,000 barrier seven times, and has never had a daily peak of less than 60,000. This has resulted in a mind-blowing 17 million total hours of viewership, compared to his 4.2 million hours over the same number of days leading up to the re-release. Put simply: World of Warcraft Classic has made Asmongold the most watched streamer on Twitch.
