So they released some new stats yesterday
I thought it’d be fun to do some napkin math to try to ascertain a rough estimate of how many people are playing overwatch. These rely on a ton of assumptions, and are more for fun than anything else
182,522,380 Bobs summoned. Our assumptions: 1 in 38 players is playing ashe at any given time, the average ashe player uses Bob every 2.5 minutes.
This would imply that 456,305,950 minutes or 316879 total days of ashe were played, which would imply that 12,041,402 total days of overwatch were played. That means every day of the year 32,990 days of overwatch are played, which would imply 32,990 players are on at any given time
146,621 days of pharah airtime. We’ll again assume 1 in 38 players is playing pharah at any time, and we’ll also assume the average pharah player has 50% air uptime (mind you this includes time spent dead and not inside of fights) This would mean 293,242 total days of pharah were played. This is a similar number to ashe, and doing the same math results in 30,529 players online at any given time
573,189 hours, or 23883 days, spent in mischief and magic. This one will require the most assumptions. The event ran for 15 days, meaning that every day 1592 days of mischief and magic were played, so at any given time 1592 people were playing the mode. Old stats say around 15% of the playerbase is in arcade at a given time, and there are 7 arcade modes. Assuming each is played equally (of course this wouldn’t be accurate for a new limited time gamemode, just being generous), that means 2% of the overall playerbase was in mischief and magic at a time, and the game has 79,600 players online at any given time. Another way to look at this stat is that if you assume the average player spent 30 minutes playing mischief and magic, then the game has a million active users
26,747,833 call mech kills. According to overbuff, d.va on average gets 2 call mech kills per 10 minutes (somehow?), or 5 minutes per kill, meaning 133,739,165 minutes or 92,874 days of D.va were played. This is 3 times less than pharah and ashe, and would reuslt in a player count of 9,669 which is definitely not accurate. I suspect this stat is bugged in game, because I checked and mine is about 2 per 10 minutes and that does not feel accurate at all.
Winston, lucio, and Brigitte boops… yeah I’m not even going to attempt this one. And of course highest battlepass level isn’t relevant.
So in total somewhere between 30,529 and 79,600 players. And mind you this does not include all the players in queues, menus, in the setup phase, or in modes where these stats don’t apply (e.g. lucioball, custom games), if you assume that’s about 1/3 of the total time spent playing the game, it’s more like 45,000 to 120,000
So yeah this obviously wasn’t very accurate at all, just thought it’d be interesting to take a crack at it. You could probably get more accurate if you look at all the exact stats and take pickrates and gamemodes into account.