Overwatch's player base rocketed to new heights, or at least heights the game hadn't seen in years, with the launch of Season 1 and five new playable heroes earlier this month, but in a rare turn for live service games, its player count didn't start trailing off soon after its big update. In fact, the perennial hero shooter actually grew its audience week over week.
When Overwatch Season 1 first came out, the game pulled in just over 165,000 players at the same time on Steam alone. The seasonal update's first weekend then remained steady, hitting a peak of 122,715 players thanks to strong word of mouth and popular streamers returning to the game.
That's normally where a major live service update would plateau, but Overwatch actually expanded its player base this weekend (February 20 to February 22) and reached a 136, 582 player peak on Steam. The trend was consistent across this entire weekend, too – Season 1's second Friday out in the world outperformed its first, as did its second Saturday and Sunday.
Concrete player numbers aren't so readily available for platforms outside of Valve's storefront, so we have no clue how this all translates to consoles or Battle.net, but Overwatch has also been stable and steadily climbing Xbox's 'Most Played Games' chart as well, currently wedged behind fellow behemoths, Marvel Rivals and Battlefield 6.
"Not on Steam, but I'm one of the people that got back in to the game with the new heroes and I can confirm – my word of mouth is very positive," one returning player writes over on Reddit. Another quite succinctly sums up the state of the game: "We're so back"
To its credit, Blizzard Entertainment has been pretty eager to keep a hold on the game's revived fanbase. Even some of this weekend's impressive crowd probably logged in to claim their free Overwatch lootboxes and double XP given away as a "thank you" from the devs. But while a new batch of heroes and freebies got players through the door, I suspect the generally solid and fun as heck state of the game is what's keeping people tuned in.
Blizzard is already nerfing Overwatch's Jetpack Cat as the hero continues to suffer from constant bans: "She can be very, very lethal."
