The Mythic Dungeon International is Blizzard’s premier sanctioned PvE esports competition for World of Warcraft. But one of its top players thinks the company could be doing more to make it successful.
Method DPS player Gingi dished out a list of things the developer could be doing better to improve the competition’s audience on his personal Twitch stream today.
“Number one: Not be on YouTube,” he said. “Number two: They can do more to advertise it, definitely, than what Blizzard is doing at the moment.”
The first two items on his list were simple and forward, but certainly aren’t the words of a company man trying to protect a brand. Activision Blizzard made waves early this year when it announced a deal to stream esports exclusively on YouTube.
Though much of the deal’s attention was given to mobilization of the massive production that is the Overwatch League, the deal also meant that smaller competitions, like the MDI and the Arena World Championship (WoW’s PvP esports competition), would be moved as well.
While YouTube Gaming is the second most-watched game streaming platform, its viewership is still less than half of what Twitch produces, making it harder for younger or less-established events to build an audience.
In Q1, Twitch’s 1.2 billion hours watched dwarfed YouTube’s 389 million, according to Streamlabs’ quarterly report. The sheer volume of viewers who regularly go to Twitch makes it so that small and medium-sized esports events and competitions can get a little bit of extra exposure that they otherwise might miss out on if they were hidden on a lesser-viewed platform.
For the MDI, getting that extra potential exposure could be critical for the competition’s survival. After starting as an invitational competition in 2017, the event was rebranded at the beginning of last year and expanded, culminating in an MDI world finals at BlizzCon.
Prior to the 2019 season that ended in the fall, the AWC was the only WoW esport that held its yearly finale at BlizzCon.
Published: Apr 27, 2020 03:58 pm