Surprising channel tops Twitch charts in mid July

From July 15 to 21, the most popular channels on Twitch were dethroned by a surprising challenger.

It was neither a major esports league or event nor any of Twitch’s biggest individual creators that topped the viewership charts for the past week.

Instead, the streaming platform has been dominated by Method, who are streaming their progress in the race to claim the world first clear of World of Warcraft’s The Eternal Palace raid on the hardest difficulty, the Mythic tier.

Not only did Method claim the most hours watched, but it wasn’t particularly close – Method clocked a massive total of 4.2 million hours, almost double the next most-viewed channel, ESL, at 2.2 million.

It wasn’t exactly a quiet week elsewhere on Twitch either. The weekend saw some of the world’s best CS:GO teams competing at IEM Chicago, the first event of the Intel Grand Slam Season 3, where Team Liquid hit yet another massive milestone.

Over the course of the week, the Europe and Americas Minors for the StarLadder Berlin Major also took place, and the LCS and the LEC – the premier League of Legends leagues that are both streamed on the Riot Games channel – both broadcast on their regular schedule. Meanwhile, the likes of Tfue, shroud, and Ninja all put in shifts on their personal channels.

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Beating them all, though, is Method’s ‘race to world first’ stream, which kicked off on Tuesday July 16 and has been running almost non-stop ever since.

While claiming world first boss kills has always been a point of pride for elite players in World of Warcraft, this year the race has evolved into a much bigger community event, with guilds streaming their progress rather than keeping it hidden.

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Method are the most accomplished guild of the last several years and the favorites to win the race, and their progress is being broadcast from the TakeTV studio in Germany, where many of their raiders have congregated for the duration.

Method themselves spend up to sixteen hours per day taking on The Eternal Palace, and even when they’re not raiding, the Method stream is keeping track of race progress by teams around the world.

Method’s dominance of Twitch may not be indefinite, but it could continue for quite some time yet. At the time of writing, though Method and several other guilds are facing the final boss of the raid, Queen Azshara, many are predicting it could still be almost a week before the actual kill is secured and the race ends.