Overwatch Is Blizzard's Fastest Game to Hit 20M Players
By Kyle Sledge 06 November 2016
Video game publisher Activision officially declares the team-based first-person shooter Overwatch to be Blizzard’s fastest title to hit 20 million players.
Just a few weeks ago, Blizzard released the impressive statistic that revealed Overwatch had hit 20 million registered players. Now, during an earnings call today, the video game publisher Activision built on that information by officially declaring the team-based first-person shooter to be the fastest game in Blizzard’s stable of releases to hit the milestone around the world.
Furthermore, Activision attributes a lot of its success during this quarter to Blizzard and Overwatch itself, with the publisher posting record third-quarter revenues to reach $1.57 billion, which comes out to be an increase of 58 percent compared to the company’s 2015’s third financial quarter. Interestingly enough, with Overwatch now being Blizzard’s fastest title to hit 20 million registered players, Actvision went on to reveal the developer has had a 50 percent increase of monthly active users year-over-year.
Of course, these statistics aren’t difficult to believe, especially with Blizzard’s near-constant post-launch support for Overwatch since its release earlier in May of this year. For instance, the studio just recently ended the game’s Halloween event, and developers have even more action planned for the future. As it happens, Overwatch‘s principal designer Scott Mercer recently revealed that Season 3 for the competitive mode of the shooter will begin on December 1.
Overwatch isn’t Blizzard’s only game as of late to make waves when it comes to popularity. During its earnings call, Activision also revealed that upon its release, World of Warcraft: Legion sold 3.3 million copies on its first day “matching all-time records achieved by previous expansions” for the popular MMO.
Not long ago, during ChinaJoy 2016, NetEase president Li Riqiang discussed his company’s partnership with the game’s developer Blizzard, bringing up the studio’s potential plans to possibly introduce a free trial for Overwatch sometime in the near future. While this hasn’t officially been confirmed by the developer or come to fruition as of yet, should Blizzard do so, it wouldn’t be bizarre to find that the registered user base for Overwatch growing exponentially.
Taking all of this into consideration, it’s safe to say that Overwatch is easily one of the most popular releases of 2016. So, should Blizzard eventually make the TV show based on the shooter that it has teased in the past, then even that could influence gamers who haven’t tried the game yet to pick up a copy and register as a player. In any event, we will just have to wait and see what other strategies Blizzard utilizes to goose Overwatch‘s registration numbers even more so.
Overwatch is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Source: Activision
