Overwatch 2 daily player count is "nearly triple" the original's peak
Overwatch 1 reached 25 million players in eight months - Overwatch 2 did it in 10 days
Activision Blizzard has announced that Overwatch 2 reached 25 million players in just 10 days, with daily player peaks reaching triple those of the original game.
"The game has proven to be a global phenomenon," Activision Blizzard says in a press release, "already achieving a daily player base spread near-even across EMEA, Asia, and the Americas that’s nearly triple the previous daily player peak from the original Overwatch." We don't have specific numbers on those daily player peaks, but these metrics do include players across all platforms.
A total of 25 million players have jumped into Overwatch 2 within just 10 days of launch, a figure that took the original game eight months to achieve. We can make the joke for you - how many of those 25 million got to actually play the game once they logged in with all the server issues? A combination of normal day-one server issues and abnormal DDoS attacks has given the game a rough opening act.
Obviously, Overwatch 2 has a big advantage over the original game in terms of attracting players, since it's free-to-play and the original was a full-price purchase. Overwatch 1's numerous free weekends make that difference a bit less significant, however, and either way it's clear that there's plenty of interest in the sequel. Overwatch 1 also notably didn't initially launch on Nintendo Switch, a platform that was surely a big boost for Overwatch 2.
The devs have also announced a few more details on the double XP weekends coming as an apology for Overwatch 2's rocky launch. Those events will run at the following times.
- Starting October 21 at 11:00am PT, ending October 24 at 11:00am PT
- Starting October 28 at 11:00am PT, ending October 31 at 11:00am PT
- Starting November 24 at 11:00am PT, ending November 28 at 11:00am PT
Pour one out for Overwatch's cow jiggle.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.