Asmongold

About

Asmongold, sometimes abbreviated Asmon, is an American Twitch streamer and one of the platform's biggest World of Warcraft (WoW) players. Describing himself as a “professional neckbeard,” he has almost 2 million Twitch followers and over 500,000 YouTube subscribers. He is a member and co-founder of the content creator network One True King.

History

Originally, Asmongold first gained his following through his YouTube channel but has been active on Twitch since 2014.^[8] Asmon mainly streams^[1] himself playing WoW, but also commonly does video reactions and occasionally plays other games. While gaming, he frequently chats about the state of the game, the community, Blizzard, other gaming topics and current news. He occasionally holds in-game WoW competitions and events. These events are often announced on his Twitter^[2] and later posted on his YouTube^[3] channel.

A popular series for him, a video of an event called a "Mount Off" was uploaded to his YouTube^[4] channel on May 1st, 2021, and received 452,000 views in three weeks (shown below)

Sometimes, Asmongold's streams are joined by his friend McConnell through Discord, who then frequently mocks him and his in-game performance. The video titled "McConnell ROASTS Amongold For 12 Minutes Straight" was uploaded to Asmon's YouTube^[5] channel on December 7th, 2020, and received 329,000 views in six months (shown below).

His fans and Twitch chat frequently joke about his shut-in lifestyle and how he's supposedly going bald, earning him the derogatory nickname "Asmonbald" and having characters in-game type out messages to him calling him bald. The video "Asmongold Force To Go Outside After Power Outage" was uploaded to the YouTube^[6] channel on September 9th, 2020, and received 328,000 views in nine months, and is all about his life as a shut-in (shown below).

World of Warcraft: Classic

Ahead of the 2017 announcement of World of Warcraft: Classic, Asmongold had long wished for and speculated about the game mode's development. Upon the release of Classic in 2019, he surged in overall popularity. His video reaction to the announcement of Classic WoW was posted on his main YouTube^[7] channel on September 26th, 2018, and received 44,000 views in three years (shown below).

Final Fantasy XIV Drama

On July 3rd, 2021, Asmongold started playing Final Fantasy XIV following popular demand from his viewers. Several FFXIV players expressed discontent over him getting engaged in the game, citing him as having a toxic and hateful personality or community. Adam Holisky, a Blizzard employee, replied to such a tweet in agreement, calling Asmongold "an asshole." Asmongold responded to this criticism on the following day (stream highlight below), dismissing the negativity as nonsense.

In his initial FFXIV stream, there were many players who started griefing Asmon by blocking NPCs with their characters so that he couldn't talk and complete quests or killing mobs so he wouldn't be able to get quest credit, as well as clogging up server space in cities so he could not zone in or would heavily lag upon zoning in. Square-Enix took action against these people by later banning some of them for harassment and stream sniping. This was touched on in a video by Asmongold^[9] on July 6th, 2021, which has received over 600,000 views in 14 days (shown below).

As he continued to play, his Twitch continued to grow, giving him some of the highest numbers of his career. As his Twitch numbers rose, so did the number of players on FFXIV. There was a sudden surge of players who made accounts to play the game, resulting in the online web store actually running out of pre-generated online codes for FFXIV. Selling out of digital copies of a game is something that was theorized to be impossible, but was later explained in the video Asmongold reacted to on July 15th, 2021, earning 330,000 views in six days (shown below).

WoW Is Kill

Furthering the divide between Asmongold and Blizzard was a supposed leak on 4chan that has an inside look into Blizzard's internal communications about WoW.^[10] The leak, which isn't confirmed as authentic, describes many things that someone who is part of Asmongold's target audience would wish to hear, so it understandably makes Asmon and others very skeptical. Regardless of the legitimacy, in a video going over the leak and a response to the leak by a former Blizzard dev, Asmongold proceeded to check the trending charts for FFXIV and WoW during a stream, only to discover that his move to FFXIV acted as the catalyst that helped to catapult FFXIV to its highest player and new sign-up numbers (seen below).

This sudden boost in FFXIV isn't solely because of Asmongold, as he and others attest, but rather he was the one who signaled to other Twitch gamers that switching to FFXIV could be good for your channel. Something that Asmongold touched on in his July 2021 streams is that Twitch itself as a platform is very reactionary, and will jump to whatever trend seems to be going well. Once Asmongold started playing, others followed suit, and because FFXIV has a free trial up through the entire first expansion, it means that every person subbing to a streamer who switches to the MMO can be a potential sign-up, causing a snowball effect.

While Asmongold has said that he is not done playing WoW and will continue to keep up with it, he is already starting to do the things he did in WoW in FFXIV. On July 19th, 2021, Asmongold hosted his first "transmog contest" on FFXIV, with the help of veteran players Zepla and Rich, already showing that the same things he used to do in WoW can cross over to FFXIV, giving him less incentive to go back (shown below).

Personal life

Asmongold's real given name is Zack and he lives in Austin, Texas.^[2] He is reportedly around 33 years old. Some sources report his birthday as April 20 (i.e. 420), which he denies.

Examples of content

Examples of fanart and memes

Search interest

References