World of Warcraft nearly hits 1 million viewers on Twitch with Shadowlands launch

It didn’t take long for World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands expansion to make its mark on Twitch. 

In less than 20 minutes of the expansion’s launch, the game hit its peak for 2020 with more than 953,000 concurrent viewers. At the time of writing this story, Asmongold is the top streamer in the category with a peak of more than 220,000 viewers. 

While these viewership totals are a high for WoW and Asmongold this year, they aren’t records for the game nor the streamer.

Last August, WoW hit its all-time high viewership on Twitch with 1.1 million viewers during the release of WoW Classic. The Classic launch also led Asmon to his career high of more than 260,000 viewers. 

This year’s launch viewership peak is notably higher than the game’s peak viewership for the last expansion that released in August of 2018. Battle for Azeroth launched with a peak of around 590,000 viewers. 

At the time, Sodapoppin was the most-watched WoW streamer with a peak of just under 87,000 viewers. Asmongold was second with a peak of 56,450.

The improvement in peak viewership for an expansion release isn’t something that’s exclusive to WoW though. Twitch on the whole has seen marked viewership growth in 2020 as the platform continues to reach reach viewership records. 

In October, the platform posted it’s all-time high hours watched mark, according to StreamElements and Arsenal’s monthly report with more than 1.6 billion hours watched. The previous record for hours watched in a month was set just a few months ago in April.