The launch of the new version of Warcraft 3 was awful as much as the game's original version is legendary. The players have met the "reforged" game with unbelievable disappointment. Today we will talk about the way this situation was reflected in the statistics.

But before that, let's take a quick detour into the topic's history. In the recent past, when the millions of dollars worth prize pools were nowhere to be found, the esports industry has only started its growth with the World Cyber Games international championship as the trailblazer. The original version of Warcraft was one of the main disciplines of this event.

After some time the esports market was occupied by various representatives of the MOBA genre. By the way, the origins of the latter can be traced not even to the WC3 map editor but to StarCraft (where it was known as "Aeon of Strife"). However, it was the Defence of the Ancients map that gave the genre its actual popularity. In turn, it has spawned such successors as League of Legends and Dota 2.

It can be easy to deduce that for many esports participants WarCraft is chock-full of nostalgia and pleasant memories. One can imagine how the fans of this RTS must have felt upon learning of Blizzard's announcement of the game's re-release. Additionally, the studio has specifically stated that this is not a simple remaster with higher-definition textures, but a full-fledged remake, i.e. a product redesigned from the grounds up.

However, as soon as into the first beta test of the game, it became awfully clear that the announced aims were not reached. At this moment already, many testers have started to leave negative responses about the game. After the release of the game's final version, it has turned out that it's not really different from the version used for beta-testing. The fans of the RTS have rightfully felt cheated and started requesting refunds, as well as giving the game the lowest scores possible, wherever possible. The negativity surrounding the game has reached the point of it receiving one of the lowest user ratings in the Metacritic's history.

This very situation is also reflected by the Twitch category statistics, with the game's visibility decreasing by more than a half in the first week. On the eighth day from the release date, the number of views has amounted to merely 35% of those seen on the first day.

The average viewers indicator has shown the same result, losing 65% of the audience a week later. The peak viewers indicator shows a loss less terrible (yet still quite negative) and amounts to a total of 45% over the course of the week.

All of this has happened since the majority of streamers were straight out disappointed in the RTS, with the majority of channels switching to other games on the second or third day already. For such a legendary title, this is more than a failure.

The fans of the Warcraft series would be the ones responsible for the statistics not dropping even further. When looking at the audience, Grubby the "Orc King" would be the one that helped the most, spending 56 hours of his weekly airtime on this game (which amounts to eight hours a day on average).

Sodapoppin became the second most watched streamer. Being as well known for his World of Warcraft adventures as he is, he simply couldn't miss this legendary re-release, however unsuccessful it has turned out. As such, his 17 hours of broadcasting brought the category a total of 378 hours watched. In addition, he has the highest peak viewers mark among the top 10, amounting to 32 thousand viewers.

To conclude, we should state that for Warcraft 3 Reforged there's much work to be done. Should the developers succeed at solving all the problems, the fans may actually return to the game and provide more views. After all there'll be a whole series of tournaments from DreamHack and ESL, which will no doubt become the core content for those interested in the esports part of this RTS.