WoW Forever: launch tops Twitch with over 1 million viewers

The launch of WoW Forever has put World of Warcraft at the top of Twitch. When the global servers opened on 4 November, the category passed 1.1 million viewers at the same time, reported as the second biggest peak in the history of the series.

The audience held up the next day. On the afternoon of 5 November World of Warcraft sat at around 385,000 viewers, ahead of Just Chatting on 145,000 and League of Legends on 81,400. The most popular WoW channel at that moment, Ahmpy, had around 18,300 viewers.

Twitch added its own features for the launch, including automatic recaps of the best stream moments and an Armory extension that shows a streamer's gear and talents live. Viewers also have a reward to collect: the Pouch of Violet Dust needs 4 hours of watching during launch week.

These are viewer counts, not player counts. Blizzard has published no figures for how many people are playing, and it has kept WoW subscriber numbers to itself since around 2015.