As pretty much everyone would have expected, Blizzard’s most recent venture in the First Person Shooter experience yielded very impressive results. So far, Overwatch has proven to incite as much hype as the Diablo III launch; and that is no easy task. Of course, Blizzard is proud of their most recent achievement.
In fact, the game did so good that it not only convinced Blizzards to prolong the open beta by one day, but it also generated porn searches to spike dramatically. So exactly how popular is Overwatch? Let’s look over some recent numbers and facts and try to determine that for ourselves.
Popularity
As soon as the game was announced, people started freaking out. Blizzard was making a shooter. Blizzard was making an FPS similar to Team Fortress. And in their typical Blizzard fashion, most of the initial hype was accomplished by releasing interesting and compelling trailers that left people wanting to learn more about the characters.
Now, that the launch date is nearly upon us, Blizzard went for an Overwatch open beta, so that people would be able to play the game and see just how fun it was a couple of weeks before its launch date. The game proved to be so popular that the company prolonged the beta by one day, allowing more fans to be caught up in the hype.
Fan requests
But Blizzard isn’t just like any other triple A company, eager to make as much money as possible at the expense of their fans. Not only does the company market the game at a lower price, since it lacks a single player campaign, but it also takes into account the players’ opinions regarding the future of the title.
Even if the developers announced that the beta build is the launch build minus a few additions and minor bug fixes, players are already complaining about the in-game balance. Realizing that their fans are right and that Reaper was indeed overpowered, one of the first things to be implemented as soon as the game is officially launched is going to be to nerf the character. But that’s just the first of many nerfs and patches.
Porn searches
The game is so popular, in fact, that the porn searches for characters present in Overwatch went up by a whopping 817 percent following the open beta’s start on May 5th. The most popular characters were Tracer and Widowmaker, and all searches showed that people preferred to look for hentai involving the characters.
Interestingly, it was Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe to find themselves at the top of the searches, with South Korea taking the cake, followed closely by Belarus and Russia. Meanwhile, people from Brazil and Vietnam searched the least for Overwatch porn. But that’s rule 34 for you, so it’s going to happen regardless.
Image source: YouTube