Blizzard has opened the servers of the classic World of Warcraft. The event was watched by 1.1 million people on Twitch. This is the peak number of viewers in the history of the game and one of the top on the service.
The broadcast of the launch of WoW Classic at its peak gathered more viewers than the release of a major addon “Battle for Azeroth”. It took place a year ago and at that time became the most viewed WoW event on Twitch (with an indicator of 580 thousand simultaneous viewers).
But even when the number of WoW Classic viewers declined and reached 642,000, it still accounted for 42% of all Twitch viewers that evening.
Moreover: World of Warcraft Classic turned out to be almost as popular as Fortnite. The latter still holds the record for simultaneous views — 1.3 million people. WoW’s success is comparable to League of Legends and CS:GO (1.1 million people each, according to Githyp). Other top projects do not even reach: GTA V has a peak number of viewers — 140 thousand, PUBG Mobile — 38 thousand.
However, not all viewers were able to admire the vanilla WoW directly. The excitement around the game was such that it generated giant queues for servers – 10-20 thousand people each. And that’s why only such windows were shown on many broadcasts:
Those who still waited to enter the game could also see queues inside the game world:
But, we note, this incident attracted the increased attention of Twitch viewers no worse than the game itself.
The current World of Warcraft Classic is a reconstruction of the famous 2004 title. Access to it was automatically granted to all holders of a WoW subscription.
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