OTK’s World of Warcraft 1v1 bracket becomes the most popular tournament for the discipline
Earlier this year, OTK Network partnered with Blizzard and Starforge to present the OTK Hardcore Mak’gora Tournament. The event took place on official Hardcore WoW Classic servers and was open to all players to participate. The event was hugely popular and became the most popular World of Warcraft event ever.
Participants were instructed to create a new character on October 6, and they were given just over three weeks to grind their character to Level 60, the max. A reminder that the event took place on Hardcore servers, so if your character died while grinding to 60, it was back to the beginning.
After three weeks of grinding and leveling, participants were invited to a Qualifiers. In the qualifiers, all participants dueled each other until a top 64 was decided. Once the players were determined, they moved on to the Mak’gora duels: a duel to the death. Players fought each other in a bracket stage, challenging each opponent to a Mak’gora with the winner moving on. The loser would have their character die, permanently.
The finals were officially hosted on the Twitch channels EsfandTV, sodapoppin, and Xaryu. However, the event organisers announced the event was open to any community casters who wanted to cover the event. In the end, more than 80+ channels covered the tournament and contributed towards its Peak Viewers.
OTK Mak’gora Tournament Viewership
In total, the event received over 3.34M Hours Watched across the 80+ streamers to cover the event. The most-watched of these was zachrawrr, otherwise known as Asmongold. The streamer is a well-known member of the WoW community, and he was also the most popular option for fans to spectate the event through.
The remainder top channels of the event by Hours Watched and Peak Viewers were the official broadcast channels that the event announcement linked to. Xaryu ranked second in both watch time and peak viewership, with 429K HW and 51.5K PV. EsfandTV was the final streamer on the watch time podium, with 339.5K HW and sodapoppin was the third-most-popular streamer with 42.7K Peak Viewers.
In terms of Average Viewers, it might surprise you which streamers were the most popular by this metric. The top three streamers by Average Viewers was not the same as the top three by watch time, and this data is available to our PRO subscribers on the tournament page for the event.
The event came to a conclusion as Snutz and Ziqo faced off in the final duel to the death. Ultimately, Snutz came out on top with his Warlock, and his character is safe to retire with no more Mak’gora in sight. Snutz took hom $50K USD of the total $100K prize pool, the remaining $50K to be split among the best-placing players for each class.
The event was hugely popular, reaching 305.4K Peak Viewers thanks to the contributions of more than 80 channels on Twitch. But the tournament was also one of the most popular WoW events ever. By sorting through our database of esports tournaments and events, we can see that OTK’s Hardcore Mak’gora was the most popular World of Warcraft event in history.
The event was bested by the Race to World Castle Nathria event, which received 350.6K Peak Viewers. The Race to World event is not an esports tournament in the traditional sense and the event sees the top guilds from around the world compete to be the first to complete a task, and is routinely one of the most popular events in World of Warcraft.
Compared to other traditional esports events in World of Warcraft, the new OTK event was by far the most popular esports event ever held in the discipline. The OTK-hosted event benefitted from combining the new-wave viewership of live-streaming enthusiasts and OTK fans with the old-school World of Warcraft audience.
The OTK Hardcore Mak’gora Tournament became the most popular World of Warcraft event in almost three years. World of Warcraft has been a staple name of gaming for decades at this point, and it will not disappear from the gaming world anytime soon. With the Hardcore tournament being so popular, the discipline proves that it has much more to contribute to the world of esports.
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