According to this article at least: htt ps://gamerant.com/overwatch-2-steam-player-count-high-growth/
This specific article focuses on Steam’s numbers. You might remember Steam was the place OW2 was infamously review bombed, but players are still showing up to play regardless, and I think that’s because of the recent changes to the game.
If you look at that to mean 5v5 is working, then yes I think it is! But it also means the choices they made to give more people CC, the literal opposite thing that they said they’d do for Overwatch 2 is also contributing to this. The game just feels better when more people can use CC abilities.
I think we should wait a little while before I include the tank buffs in that, but I also think we’d instantly know if people hated the buffs to tanks. People would just stop playing the game, and the player numbers would reflect that. The point is, the choices to walk back Overwatch 2 changes while retaining the 5v5 format seems to be a good idea. Lets hope it lasts because I also think there’s evidence that Overwatch 2 is struggling financially. I Blizzard themselves admitted it fell short of their expectations recently.
Regardless, maybe the good times will continue? I hope so!
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Idk for you but for me, since they put the gold coins in the bp and now that I reached lvl 80… I’m no longer forcing myself to play all roles (aka Tank) to do my challenges.
So now I’m playing whoever I want to play (except tank) for fun and so I’m playing more than before.
But I think it will make longer queue times with less tanks players xD
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This is very good news 
And there’ll be even more Steam players once OW2 gets back to China this summer.
GG OW2 keep making the right choices!
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It can potentially be attributed to plethora of things – better marketing, no hero paywalls, improved battle pass mechanics (coins), etc., all of which make the game feel more rewarding or exciting. I definitely don’t think 5v5 is working. If you kept OW1 mechanics, improved the engine (without calling it OW2), brought it to Steam, made it free, created a fair battle pass in the first place, spent years making new content instead of lying to us about OW2 player vs. environment, etc., I imagine OW would’ve seen a resurgence far greater than what it is right now.
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for plenty of time i started playing with same people in qp every evening , it never happened in ranked before , but recently it happens there too , i might play 3-5 games in the row with same 10 people min in teams . I doubt it says anything good about playerbase
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Does that mean the game is doing well, or just that more people are converting to steam from Battle.net?
With OW being F2P now, it makes sense more accounts will exist. There are more alt accounts now than ever. I’d want to see total player count across platforms (NOT number of accounts).
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At the time of this post OW2 is top 13th on Twitch with 26.7 viewers. That’s top in all games/categories. Player interest is def there.
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This just in, people who breathe air die. Must mean air is fatal.
False equivalence.
The reality is a bunch of new Overwatch competitor news is coming out, mixed in with a new major update means interest in this genre is rising. It’ll most likely die back down.
i highly doubt 30,000 players on steam should be an indicator of growing population of players, I suspect its just new players using one of the largest platforms (Steam) and trying out Overwatch, whilst the older player count bleeds out. Since Blizzard would never admit how many people actually play the game and gives a statistically biased number like “30 million unique players” this month.
With negative press after negative press, in what world would players be rushing to play the 10% rating game on steam? Its the same with the TF2 situation where somehow the player count is still rising despite of how dead the game is
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Funny, I keep seeing the same people over and over again in both qp and comp. So either it’s pure coincidence or the article is straight up lying. I personally have barely played the game in the past 3-4 weeks. I was gonna get back on when I heard hanzo was getting a buff, I knew the one shot was not coming back so I hoped he would at least get a faster fire rate only to realize blizzard actually nerfed him some more. I play like 1-2 games a week now because I cant seem to find the motivation to enjoy the game. Not to mention tracer and sombra just wont even let me play the game anymore lol
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depends on regions, i have only met one player consistently and that was in open queue in OCE
otherwise i highly doubt there is any or much new players like this article claims, this game has gotten so much negative press, i doubt people play games that have very low reviews
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Movies can still do well on box office despite bad critic/user reviews.
Oh geez, this again? Look, obviously Steam is a far more popular gaming platform than Battle.net ever has been, and Overwatch on Steam is still relatively new, so people are more likely going to be pouring in from there. That said, the majority of the players arguably still exist on Battle.net, and some—still—may merely still be switching from their BNet account to their steam account (I know I still haven’t gotten around to switching to using Steam, or really feel motivated to). It would be wrong to claim those players choosing to switch to Steam are constituting community growth.
So what are the population trends on Battle.net? Blizzard won’t post the numbers, which implies the summed totals (of the whole community), including the growth (or decline) rate, is probably nothing worth getting excited over. We know from the company’s past behavior that they have bragged about player population sizes and growth rates for their past IPs (e.g. World of Warcraft), which should be rather telling about how the devs feel about the current state of the Overwatch community.
Even if the overall Overwatch population growth/decline rate has settled down to be relatively flat, it should be no surprise that the Steam population numbers are still growing. And if that’s the (most likely) case, it would be misleading to suggest the population and its growth rate on Steam directly correlate to the Battle.net’s or is in any way an accurate indication of the health of the game or of player satisfaction.
Given all the unpleasant and bad news surrounding Blizzard, of Microsoft cutting even more jobs (which likely stands to affect Overwatch), and just of Overwatch news itself, I’d imagine the marketing department Blizzard must be grasping at straws for something, anything positive right now to hype over to counter all the negativity. They absolutely would be boasting of their player numbers—especially growth rate—given such metrics would be a total freebie of a talking point for them. Yet, they don’t. Their silence over the matter should speak volumes. Steam’s numbers may perhaps be interesting, but they must remember what those numbers represent just a the sub portion of the entire community. When trying to understand the big picture, and get a real feel for the state of the entire community, one would be wise to take any and all claims that rely solely on Steam’s population numbers with a grain of salt.
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I can’t tell if this is sarcasm. 5v5 will never really work no matter what they do. Steam player numbers mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.
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6 v 6 also aint coming back, and there is OQ anyways.
But as it is, 30k+ players isnt great but it aint terrible either at least.
I am running into a lot of apparently new players - no endorsement rank to speak of, don’t really seem to be familiar with the game (I don’t mean that in an insulting way, every game is new to someone sometime) - so I can believe there is some sort of influx.
As to why - maybe they’re Porsche fans, maybe they’re steam randos, maybe they’re the kids watching smurf vids thinking they’d like a slice of that steamrolling action?
I’ll be interested to see how long they stick around, because at least from the games I am seeing, they are probably not having a good time.
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The Porsche fans overunning Overwatch
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Now all games with a negative review can just invoke “review bombed” and that gets rid of all the criticism.
I swear, people now.
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I dont think an increase in steam numbers affects the overall player population of this pay to win game much, because steam players are a very tiny segment of it
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I wouldn’t call that “review bombing”… but. Yeah, they’re doing slightly better.
Now they just need to work on their customer service and support. >_>
The false reports and false suspensions are getting very out of hand.