World of Warcraft Classic is now here and it looks like quite a few fans have already tuned into Twitch to catch some of the new, old-school style WoW in action. Last week concurrent WoW viewers hit a big number on the streaming platform, with over 1.1 million active viewers on Twitch. Now, the total amount of time viewers have spent watching WoW on the platform in the week since Classic released has soared – it’s been over 55 million hours.
According to Dot Esports, Twitch statistics captured on site Sullygnome have shown that, in the seven day period since WoW Classic’s launch last week, viewing hours for WoW hit the 55 million hours mark. Or, you could read that as about 6,274 years. That is a lot of WoW watching. At the time of writing, the numbers have now changed to just under the 48 million hours mark over the past seven days, with the first day’s numbers now just outside the week-long capture period.
Comparing current numbers to those of the other most-watched games on Twitch at the time of writing reflects how huge a number this is. According to Sullygnome, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has had around 19.2 million, League of Legends 18.5 million, and Fortnite 16.6 million in the last seven days. While WoW is naturally seeing a big burst of interest following Classic’s launch, this is still a pretty impressive number.
This follows esports consultant and insider Rod Breslau’s post last week, reflected on site Twitch Tracker, that World of Warcraft saw its peak concurrent Twitch viewership surpass the 1.1 million mark at its launch.
As Breslau highlighted in a follow-up tweet, two channels streaming WoW Classic seemed to account for a good chunk of these views, with Asmongold’s stream seeing over 280k views and Sodapoppin’s 111k at the time of capture. While it’s not clear how many of the viewers were attributable to WoW Classic or regular WoW streams specifically, either at launch or in the current number of WoW hours watched, it’s fair to assume that many of the Twitch viewers have probably been those looking to check out Azeroth, 2006-style.
According to Twitch Tracker, in the last three months WoW has seen peak viewer counts ranging between 202k and around 244k each month, so the 1.1 million count was a pretty giant increase. August 2018, when WoW expansion Battle for Azeroth launched, saw around 600k peak viewers, according to the site.