On Sunday evening, March 13, an old Call of Duty was by far the biggest game on the streaming platform Twitch. With over 400,000 concurrent viewers, CoD: Modern Warfare 3 from 2011 surpassed the entire competition.
What’s going on?
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the CoD from 2011 and is actually “history”
- During the weekend of March 12 to March 13, the game exploded on Twitch, with over 400,000 concurrent viewers
- This was due to a tournament in the Spanish-speaking community, only “Just Chatting” could withstand the surge
CoD MW 3: More viewers than Valorant, Apex, and Warzone combined
What happened? “IlloJuan”, whose real name is Juan Alberto Garcia, is a Twitch streamer from Madrid, Spain, who streams and uploads videos in Spanish.
He organized a large tournament over the weekend that took place on Sunday, March 13, and involved many prominent Spanish content creators – the “Tarde OldSchool – Torneo Modern Warfare 3”.
Even a day prior, on Saturday, the first effects of the tournament were evident. Many participating creators practiced for the competition, bringing more viewers to MW3 than the free battle royale CoD: Warzone had to offer.
But this milestone was not to be the end. If so many viewers are there just for practice, how many are going to watch the tournament itself?
And indeed, there was a massive spike in viewer numbers for MW3 during the tournament on Sunday. At one point, there were 100,000 people just on “IlloJuan”‘s channel.
Overall, the aging MW3 peaked at over 417,000 simultaneous viewers. At that moment, it was the largest game on Twitch, surpassing Valorant, Apex, and Warzone combined.
How did this happen? Particularly in the English-speaking community, there was considerable confusion as to why the 10-year-old Call of Duty suddenly became a hit on Twitch.
For instance, the news site Dexerto headlined: “MW3 is currently the top game on Twitch with 400,000 viewers and no one knows why” (via dexerto.com).
It is often forgotten how large the Spanish language is. In terms of native speakers, Spanish even surpasses English (471 million vs. 370 million / via babbel.com, as of June 2021).
Only when non-native speakers are accounted for does English grow to be the largest language in the world (over 1.1 billion, via berlitz.com), closely followed by the Chinese language Mandarin.
The tournament also featured some of the largest Twitch streamers from the Spanish community, drawing a lot of attention to the competition:
- Rubius – about 11.5 million followers
- TheGrefg – about 9.5 million followers
- ibai – about 9.5 million followers
Additionally, there were another 6 Twitch streamers with more than 1 million followers each.
What was the outcome of the tournament? In the final, two teams faced off in a round of “Control” on Nuke Town for the win. If you want to see the final battle for yourself, you can find a video of the game here:
Such spikes occasionally happen on Twitch when fans or communities come together and host large events.
A good example of this is the hardcore shooter Escape from Tarkov. In recent years, the tough first-person shooter has consistently been one of the biggest games on Twitch at the end of the year.
Otherwise, Tarkov is more of a niche title with a dedicated fan community: Hardcore shooter is the largest game on Twitch at the beginning of 2022 – “Could take over gaming, but…”
