Overwatch 2 player-numbers are currently the strongest they’ve been on Steam since the game arrived there, spiking ahead of the game’s first expansion-like release, The Reign of Talon, which arrives tomorrow, 10th February.
Sunday, 8th February saw approximately 70,000 people playing Overwatch 2 together on Steam, according to SteamDB – which is only 5000 fewer than when Overwatch 2 launched there in August 2023. The game has struggled to break 60,000 concurrent players since then.
The numbers aren’t gigantic – they put Overwatch 2 39th in Steam’s Most Played list, which is notably lower than competing hero shooter Marvel Rivals, in 21st – but Steam isn’t the only platform Overwatch 2 is played on. The primary home of Overwatch 2 is Battle.net, so the true number of people playing Overwatch 2 is likely to be markedly higher.
It bodes well for Overwatch 2, which undergoes a bit of a relaunch this week, dropping the “2” from its name and welcoming five new heroes at once – and further five throughout the year – in a huge, unprecedented-for-the-game, expansion-like release. And the plan is to do these expansion-like releases every year. There’s a lot to unpack, as I found out when I travelled to Blizzard recently to learn about Overwatch’s bold new plan.
Overwatch 2 launched in 2023, after a year in early access, controversially overriding Overwatch 1, a game that no longer exists. Overwatch 2 moved the series to being fully free-to-play, supported by a Battle Pass, and changed group sizes to five from six. It was a rough transition, but lots of good work has been done on the game in the years since, reintroducing 6v6 battles and ironing out a lot of Battle Pass kinks, and adding significant new game modes like Stadium, in which you can mechanically customise a hero similar to how you would in a MOBA – earning new abilities as you play.
