How Many People Have Played Overwatch 2?

Activision-Blizzard recently posted its Q3 financial results for the 2022 fiscal year. This showed that Overwatch 2 has been incredibly popular. According to the video game giant, over 35 million people have tried the game since its October 4th launch.

Activision-Blizzard is reporting that the number of average daily players for Overwatch 2 in its first month was “more than double that of its acclaimed predecessor.” The company also said that many of the players were new to the series and trying Overwatch for the first time because of its free-to-play model.

The world-famous gaming organization also seemed to infer that Overwatch 2 was turning a profit. Although the company didn’t mention an exact number, they did say that player investment “is also off to a strong start, positioning the title to be a meaningful contributor to Blizzard’s business in the fourth quarter.”

Overwatch 2 has been making headlines ever since the game came out. Prior to this, Blizzard reported that the game reached the 25 million player milestone just ten days after it was launched.

The Profit‘s Take:

I had to check the date of this article because I actually thought it was an Overwatch 1 story that they changed around. I could’ve sworn that these were the exact same numbers that the first Overwatch game put up. I have a feeling that it’s all Overwatch 1 players that came back for Overwatch 2. The context of whether these are new players or Overwatch 1 players is the most important part of this article. If it’s the same 35+ million players that played Overwatch 1, I don’t think we can really call this a success. As an industry, we need to get to a place where we don’t measure a free-to-play game’s success by the number of people that log on and try it just once. You could even argue retention rates aren’t that important in the F2P space. Look at a boxed game like COD. Once you’ve paid for the game, publishers don’t care how often you log on and play it because they already HAVE your money. The only success metric we have for free-to-play games is the average spend per player. If you have a million players but only 10,000 whales that are spending a lot of money, then you can consider the game a success even though it doesn’t have a huge player base attached to it.

(All information was provided by Google and VentureBeat)