Results of AWC 2022 — what's wrong with World of Warcraft esports?

Loading

Blizzard Entertainment has concluded the summer series of AWC World of Warcraft tournaments. The PVP battles of the best teams in Europe and North America failed to attract a large audience or even approach the indicators of the Mythic Dungeon International PVE event. Despite the obvious problem, the developers continue to work with both formats not attempting any radical changes. If the company does not take action, WoW esports will soon become extinct. The Esports Charts team shares its observations and conclusions.

AWC 2022 Finals Regionals ended on July 14th. In Europe, the Kungarna roster became the best, and in North America, the victory went to the Kawhi mix: the winners received $70K each. A few days after that, the AWC 2022 Cross-Region Finals interregional stage started, in which the four best teams from each region performed. Kungarna and Kawhi again proved to be stronger than their rivals and met in the grand final of the double-elimination bracket. In the decisive match, the Europeans won with a score of 4:1. It should be noted that in the Cross-Region Finals, the total prize pool was equally distributed among all participants, regardless of the spots taken: each of the eight teams received $8K.

The audience outreach of AWC 2022 Finals in Europe and North America was almost the same. Both tournaments generated a little less than 100K Hours Watched, 13K Average Viewers, and about 17K Peak Viewers each. The Cross-Region Finals had twice the airtime, allowing the tournament to generate almost 170K Hours Watched. At the same time, the Peak and Average Viewers indicators of international event turned out to be even lower than those of any of the regions separately.

Comparison of AWC 2022 Tournaments with MDI 2022 Finals

As one can see from the table, AWC series tournaments (PVP arenas) cannot boast of a large audience. This is especially evident when compared with the Mythic Dungeon International 2022 Global Finals event, which Blizzard held a little earlier in July. It is noteworthy that MDI matches were broadcast on the same channels as the AWC PVP arenas, but the dungeon raid speedrun competition attracted many more viewers. MDI 2022 generated 382.4K Hours Watched and attracted 21K Average Viewers and 35K Peak Viewers. This is twice as much as the regional stages of AWC 2022.

Why is there such a big difference between AWC and MDI?

There are several possible reasons why PVP arena fights are not as popular with the viewers as dungeon speedruns. First of all, it's the choice of the official broadcasting platform. Blizzard has an exclusive deal with YouTube to cover all of the company's esports tournaments, including the Overwatch League, Call of Duty League, and more. However, the problem is that AWC features a number of pro clubs, such as SK Gaming, Cloud9, and Team Liquid, whose fans are used to following esports on Twitch. Moving AWC broadcasts to Amazon's platform would definitely help in increasing the audience of these tournaments.

The second reason is how the final stage was organized. As mentioned above, the matches of the Cross-Region Finals turned out to be even worse than the regional finals by audience outreach. The competition between the strongest teams in Europe and North America was supposed to be the culmination of the entire season, but the organizers ended up producing an ordinary formal event. Instead of a LAN final, there was an online competition, and instead of a steep prize pool, there was an equal distribution of money – which completely killed the suspense. The fact that the worst team received the same amount of prize money as the champion does not add any entertainment value to the tournament.

The third reason is that PVE is simply more popular than PVP in WoW. Throughout the years of the game’s existence, many users have never fought in arenas, because Blizzard's MMORPG provides enough content even without that. But almost every user raided dungeons with friends to obtain unique loot. Hence the higher interest in this particular type of competition: while watching, viewers can gain experience that they’ll be able to put to practical use.

Finally, it simply comes down to the entertainment value. PVP battles are often rather repetitive. Teams can literally run in circles one after another for several minutes in a row, waiting for the necessary cooldowns and mistakes of the opponent. PVE races always have a progressive, dynamic quality to them — as monsters and bosses in the dungeons are constantly being destroyed, and teams compete only in speed and efficiency of clearing the obstacles.

This does not mean that Blizzard should completely abandon PVP tournaments, but the company can take steps to increase their popularity. At the very least, it should be possible to hold a full-fledged LAN final for the participants of the final stage, make a nice-looking scene and invite viewers to the event. AWC and MDI can be combined by holding tournaments in the same place and at the same time. The total prize pool of these championships even exceeds the prize pool of IEM Cologne 2022. However, the CS:GO tournament in Germany gathered a whole stadium of fans and generated incredible audience coverage numbers, while the World of Warcraft championships look almost invisible in comparison.

***

The difference in audience reach between PVE and PVP World of Warcraft tournaments is obvious, but Blizzard continues to use a unified approach when working with these different formats. The company should show more flexibility and eliminate the current flaws: or, it should probably focus on only one mode that is more popular with the viewers.