An initial comparison from the 1/25/19 Elsweyr announcement launch vs the WoW Classic launch today on 8/26/2019. Peak viewers for ESO broke about 120K and WoW peak broke 1 Million. Sure, it may just be Twitch, but we cannot dismiss these metrics because they very accurately show worldwide public interest on content launches. Even without WoW or other MMO content releases, ESO barely will see 10-11k concurrent viewers at the absolute maximum on a busy day. Prior to any launches and no special content being released, viewership for ESO is very subpar to any other in the same category to what it should be for being a modern AAA MMO if we are going to compare numbers on an "any day" average. These numbers show a trend over time. ZOS/Bethesda should do better with the COMMUNITY and engage them in more ways that they do now. There is a reason why 15 years later WoW is still doing so well, re-releasing 15 year old content and still knocking it out of the ballpark. While the current state of the company that runs WoW is a completely different animal than it was years back, the devs were about their COMMUNITY back then and players don't forget that. ESO has such a HUGE chance to get just as big if not bigger being a newer MMO, but how Zenimax is choosing to run the game on a constant slippery slope and intentionally or unintentionally NOT interacting with their community is a stark reflection of why there aren't more playing, and that's really upsetting for such an amazing game with such big potential. ESO is "flourishing", but only by ESO standards. It should be able to do so much better now and especially on new content releases than 10-12% that WoW does with content that is 15 years old.

Another reason why these numbers are very important is because Zenimax uses Twitch as it's main medium for viewership and rewards (such as Crate Drops, Mounts, etc). Numbers tell the real story in every area, not just in-game so it is worth mentioning this area is lacking greatly. We all love ESO and it's the #1 reason we are literally begging Zenimax to do right by this amazing game and it's community because we want success, not failure.




For those who want a more "Apples to Apples" and "fair" viewership metric with another popular MMO, here is FFIV vs ESO on 8/26/19 during peak times and also during non-release or hyped/advertising cycles. While not as drastic in numbers as with WoW, we can still see ESO is still not as good as it should be with ~30% difference in metrics with close to the same amount of followers (~3% difference)




EDIT: Added FFIV comparison metric