WoW Hardcore raiding - PvE esports in the future?

WoW recently got their new expansion "Battle for Azeroth" and it has been very popular in Twitch (live streaming site). Last week the first Mythic difficulty raid Uldir opened. This is something that most common players spend months clearing but the top 0.1% will most likely clear in a week or so.

Now, this is nothing new, Blizzard has kept the same Raid formula since beginning of WoW and it works fine. What has changed now is the top guilds streaming their progress through this content that is impossible for most of the playerbase.

I was watching Method (arguably the best guild in the game) and their progress through Uldir. They had multiple people from raid team streaming their point of view with their leader having around 60 000 people constantly watching the stream. When they managed to kill the last boss his viewer count peaked at around 200 000 people that is insane amount for a single streamer. Usually numbers like this are seen only on some top Esports tournaments like CS:GO, Fortnite or LoL.

What is even more insane is the amount of money he made during this 8 days of progress raid. From Twitch "subscribers" alone he made almost 40 000€ and on top of that the ad revenue and sponsorship deals most likely put this number somewhere in 6 digits.

This is very interesting to see since almost everyone has claimed the "Player versus Environment" content not viable for streaming due to the nature of scripted encounters. The raiding scene has been really isolated with the guilds doing everything in their power to even prevent others from seeing what players are playing in the current raid team.

I'm not sure if this is a one-time thing due to them streaming the progress live for first time but I hope it isn't. PvE as a viable option for content creation would make a lot of people happy and maybe the developers will start creating more games outside of the regular "just go kill other players" themes.