The Amirdrassil RWF event is over and it brought big viewership on Twitch for the franchise, as well as the orgs competing.
The long battle to defend a blooming World Tree and defeat a fiery menace is now over. Team Echo came out on top over Liquid and other competing guilds to topple Fyrakk and win the final Race to World First for the Dragonflight expansion. However, it appears the real winners in the Amirdrassil RWF was Twitch, as the two-week period saw the game's highest viewing numbers of 2023, according to Streams Charts.
Moreover, the event made World of Warcraft the second most popular and highest viewed game on the streaming platform. With over 300 hours of broadcasting time during the tight raid race, the Amirdrassil RWF brought a collective 25.47 million hours viewed on Twitch.
Let's look at the full numbers.
Amirdrassil RWF a Twitch success
World of Warcraft has struggled to garner views on Twitch in the last four years. However, compared to previous years, 2023 wasn't the worst. The Amirdrassil RWF event brought a peak Twitch viewership of 470,000 viewers. In 2020--and on the back of the release of WoW Classic--the game's viewership peaked at 947,000 total live views. The worst year for WoW in that timeframe was 2021, with a peak of just over 434,000.
"Thanks to the 388.8K Peak Viewers coming from the Race to World First event, World of Warcraft was able to set a new peak viewership record for 2023 on Twitch," says the post from Streams Charts collecting the data." "In total, the beloved title was able to reach 470.9K Peak Viewers on Twitch, becoming by far the most popular moment for the game in 2023."
The popularity makes sense, as this should be considered as WoW striking while the iron is hot. We're weeks removed from the announcement of a grand, new (and Chris Metzen-approved) plan for the near 20-year-old franchise. Three expansions were revealed at BlizzCon, with the first of those, The War Within, coming next year.
Likewise, the Dragonflight raids have been of higher quality than past expansions--both in terms of mechanics, but also for viewers. The Amirdrassil RWF event on Twitch was a back and forth battle, closer than any other race to date.
Esports winter?
Is this a sign of things to come for World of Warcraft? Considering that we may be looking at a ten month period without new raid content, it could be that winter is coming. Team Liquid raid leader and co-owner Maximum commented on the content drought on Twitter, saying "No race for a year is pretty dog."
"Fated is fine as an addition at the end of an expansion to spice things up but is absolutely not acceptable as a substitution for a real patch/season."
Stay tuned to esports.gg for esports news and RWF information.