It looks like Activision’s new free-to-play Battle Royale game, Call of Duty: Warzone, is not only fun to play, but fun to watch as well. With long-range sniper battles, bombastic vehicle high jinx, and one versus one shower fights in the Gulag, the game is filled with extremely entertaining moments. It’s no wonder then, that the game achieved a number of 519,000 peak viewers on day one, with a decrease of 27% at the end of the game’s first week, according to Esports Charts.
As far as average viewers, Warzone logged 170,000 viewers on day one with an increase of 24% at the end of the first week. As of March 24, which marks two weeks since the game came out, viewership is holding steady at just over 182,000. Judging by this data, it should be encouraging that average viewership is still strong, especially compared to last year’s free-to-play Battle Royale sensation, Apex Legends. When Apex launched on February 4, 2019, the game had an average viewer count of just over 392,000 on Twitch. Two weeks after that? Apex’s numbers were down to just under 200,000, according to TwitchTracker.
The game’s success has been in large part to Jaryd “Summit1G” Lazar, who put in a monstrous 22-hour stream on launch day, and has regularly been doing 12+ hour streams of the game since then. The former Counter-Strike pro streamed Warzone exclusively for almost 90 hours in the game’s first week, for a total of over 3 million hours watched, also according to Esports Charts. This number dwarfs the next leading streamer, Herschel “DrDisrepect” Beahm, who logged just over 1.3 million hours watched in 32 hours of stream time.
Tournaments also helped the game become a Twitch juggernaut, highlighted by the Code Green championship. The tournament included many big-name streamers across not only Twitch, but Mixer as well, with stars such as Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, and Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek joining the fray. With a $50,000 prize pool, Warzone roped in 317,000 peak viewers and 281,000 average viewers on Twitch alone. There’s also the fact that the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic is forcing people to stay at home, which consequently has been inflating viewership numbers across many different platforms, including Twitch.
With all this in mind, it looks like Warzone is succeeding on many different fronts. And with Activision recently announcing that the game has been played by over 30 million players in the first 10 days, it will be interesting to see how far the game can go from here.
