Credit: Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard Entertainment’s 
massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft has seen many changes and expansions since its release in late 2004, but this August, the developer is looking to revitalize the original WoW experience with an unadulterated version of the game called WoW Classic.
For years, fans and players of the game have spoken out about the ever-changing nature of WoW and begged for there to be servers dedicated to people who want to play the game in its purest vanilla form.
With beta testing well underway, Twitch
viewership for streaming playing WoW Classic is showing that nostalgia for the old days of WoW is not only strong, but it also appears to have some staying power as well.
When most games release, or a beta is being played, a title will see strong viewership on Twitch for the first week. This can be compared to a new movie hitting the box office. When a new movie comes out, tons of people go to see it as soon as its out, but significantly fewer tickets are sold to see the same movie in the following weeks.
However, more than two weeks into the WoW Classic beta, viewership of the game has shown no signs of truly slowing down anytime soon. Even though much of the content in the game has been capped, top WoW streamers such as Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris and “Asmongold” have been able to continually play the game in such a way that they can find ways to engage an audience.
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Prior to the release of the Classic beta, Morris averaged 25K concurrent viewers and Asmongold averaged 19K CCV. They had 16.7M hours watched and 5.7M hours watched, respectively. From May 15-30, they’ve averaged 40K CCV and 50K CCV, respectively, with 6.5M and 5.2M hours watched. Only Turner “Tfue” Tenney has managed to produce more hours watched than Asmongold, and Morris has been the most-watched personality on Twitch.
The success of WoW’s top two streamers has helped the game across the board as well. Before the beta released, WoW wasn’t even one of the top 10 most-watched forms of content on Twitch, but from May 15-30, it has catapulted to the fourth most-watched game.
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Though the beta hasn’t been able to put WoW in the same realm as Twitch’s powerhouses like League of Legends and Fortnite week-to-week, viewership has been strong enough to occasionally outperform those titles on a given day.
For Method
co-owner Sascha Steffens, WoW Classic viewership on Twitch represents not only nostalgia held by older players, but it also represents a new young fanbase of WoW players who never got a chance to play the game the way it was when it originally came out.
“In a way it’s something that some people have never seen before. Twitch didn’t exist when Classic came out,” he said “So this is basically like a new game launch in a sense. Sure it’s somewhat familiar but it’s obviously very different from World of Warcraft on the live servers.”
By slowly releasing new content into the beta test as they move along, Blizzard is also helping streamers keep viewers engaged. Upon the beta test’s release, players were limited to only leveling up to 30 (the actual level cap in WoW Classic will be 60), and organized player-vs-player content was absent from the game.
“Blizzard was smart when it came to marketing the whole thing. They didn’t launch everything at once,” Steffens said. “They just released the [player-vs-player gamemode] battlegrounds recently. Once they released battlegrounds there was a big push in viewership again.”
Steffens concluded that viewership for the beta has been successful because of a “combination of the fact that there’s a lot to do” even without having access to everything in the game, and also Blizzard “staggering the release of features in the game.”
So as testing continues, Blizzard will continue to implement different phases and portions of WoW Classic into the beta, offering streamers more content to leverage for viewers. Whether they be longtime WoW enthusiasts seeking nostalgia or younger players who never got a chance to try it out, it seems evident that fans are engaged in WoW Classic in ways that they haven’t been for the current retail product.
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Looking at viewership of WoW on Twitch since the beginning of last year, the only time it was higher than it’s been the past two weeks was for the official launch of the game’s latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth, but even that was short-lived. Following the expansions release date, viewership dipped until Method took Twitch by storm with streams during the race to world first for the the expansion’s first raid.
With this being the beta test, it’s unclear exactly how popular WoW Classic will be upon release, but as the August launch approaches, it appears as though the game could be poised for a strong reception on Twitch and the potential to maintain some degree of staying power.
