The inaugural Warzone Wednesdays tournament – despite being held on a Tuesday – was a massive hit with fans of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s battle royale, with huge audiences flocking to Twitch, Mixer, and other streaming platforms to watch Josh ‘Josh OG’ Beaver, Jordan ‘HusKers’ Thomas, and Diego ‘Diegosaurs’ Navarrete win the $20,000 prize.
Combining the viewership from both the official, multi-view stream from the tournament’s organiser Daniel ‘Keemstar’ Keem and all the streams from the star-studded lineup, Esports Charts estimates that there was a peak of 277,000 people watching and an average viewership of 180,000.
Despite going down a treat with the viewers, Keemstar has pledged to improve the format of the tournament in order to keep people’s favourite streamers and pro players competing for longer. “One change that I desperately want to [make],” the Drama Alert host says in a Twitter video, “is to have all the teams play like seven consecutive games, and the teams with the most kills out of all those games would advance to a finals tournament. What I’m trying to do is keep some of your favourite streamers like Ninja and Lil Yachty on the stream for a longer amount of time.”
Keemstar later clarified what next weeks’ Warzone Wednesdays tournament will look like, claiming all teams will play five games of Warzone but take the game with the most amount of kills as a tiro as their score. The top four squads would then enter a semifinal, competing directly against another team to get the most combined kills out of two games of Warzone, with the same happening in the final.
Thoughts on how to improve #WarzoneWednesdays
All teams play 5 games.
Out of those 5 games, teams keep the best single game score.
All those top single game scores get ranked 1 trough 16.
The top 4 scores are semi finals & play like we did today.
— KEEM 🍿 (@KEEMSTAR) March 25, 2020
Warzone continues to be one of the most watched games on streaming platforms like Twitch and its high kill, aggressive games are seeing it stand out from other battle royales.
With Warzone Wednesdays’ rewarding players solely for kills and not overall placements or victories, we saw players dropping huge numbers in games that were fast-paced and full of action.
The tournament returns next week – on an actual Wednesday, this time – but it’s not currently clear how much the lineup of streamers, pros, and celebrities will change.
