World of Warcraft Race

The World of Warcraft Race to World First isn’t even close to being over after one week, but the buzz for the raid speedrunning event was enough to propel it into the top five games on Twitch.

According to Sully Gnome, WoW is the sixth most-watched kind of content on the site, behind titles like VALORANT, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, and Elden Ring, with over 16 million hours seen in the first week of activity. As is customary, the top category was Just Chatting.

Given the ongoing inflation of live streaming viewership, the audience is in line with what you’d anticipate from a week of RWF activity, but making comparisons to previous races is difficult. Metrics for each race will vary widely based on how long it takes the top guilds to complete the instance, and unlike the other races in this expansion, Sepulcher of the First Ones appears to be a marathon in comparison to Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination.

The current RWF is on its eighth day, and the top guilds are still several bosses away from the final fight, which generally takes a few days to kill. The fact that Team Liquid and Echo took almost 300 attempts to kill Halondrus the Reclaimer, the raid’s seventh boss out of eleven, demonstrates the duration and complexity of the raid on Mythic difficulty.

Typically, viewership for the RWF will plateau throughout the grassroots competition’s middle stages, before increasing as the top guilds approach the final boss. It’s difficult to compare this raid to earlier raids, where Echo and Liquid spent some time progressing on the final boss before the conclusion of the first week, because the best guilds haven’t even come close to that position yet. 

The top channels during the event, as one might imagine, were the channels for the top guilds and a few of their players. Maximum, Team Liquid’s raid commander, has the most viewers, followed by Echo and Team Liquid’s official broadcasts.