Overwatch 2 has been live on Steam for just over 24 hours, and we’re starting to get a sense of how many people are playing it there. The game has an all-time peak concurrent player count of 75,361 on Steam at the time of writing, and 37,688 were playing it at around 3PM ET on Friday afternoon. Not quite Baldur’s Gate 3 numbers, but pretty respectable all the same.
Looking in from the outside, it’s impossible to tell how many people are new players, and how many others have switched from Battle.net. Some Overwatch 2 console players might be playing on PC for the first time too after the switch. Others (like me) might be hopping in on Steam Deck.
Overwatch 2 has hit those numbers despite getting review bombed on Steam. The platform deems the sentiment around the game to be “overwhelmingly negative” after more than 52,000 reviews. Only 10% or so of the reviews by Friday afternoon were positive.
Many of the negative reviews concerned Overwatch 2’s monetization and the original game’s content drought between 2020 and 2022. Others criticized the downgraded PvE experience compared with what Blizzard had previously announced.
A sizeable number of those reviews were undoubtedly left in bad faith, though the decision to stop adding heroes to Overwatch while the sequel was in development was clearly a bad call.
After getting a chance to play them, I do think the PvE Story Missions are worth $15 (really $5, since that bundle covers the cost of a premium Battle Pass). The call to pivot away from the original, more ambitious PvE plan was the right one too. Many criticisms of those aspects of the game are completely valid, though. I have plenty of issues with the monetization too.
In any case, it’ll be interesting to see how the Overwatch 2 Steam player count rises and falls in the coming weeks and months. That should help us get a better understanding of the game’s ongoing popularity.
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