Number of Overwatch players worldwide 2018

How many people play Overwatch?

Overwatch, a team-based first-person shooter video game, launched in May 2016 and already a week later it was reported to have had seven million players. As of May 2018, Overwatch had 40 million players worldwide.
Overwatch’s eSports success

While the number of gamers playing Overwatch has increased dramatically, so has the appeal of the game as an eSport. The cumulative tournament prize pool for Overwatch battles worldwide stood at less than two million U.S. dollars in 2016 but rose to 6.59 million U.S. dollars by 2018. Indeed, Overwatch was the sixth most popular eSports game worldwide in 2018 based on the cumulative tournament prize pool. At the top of this list was DOTA 2, with a cumulative prize pool of over 41 million U.S. dollars.

Overwatch boosts Blizzard’s revenue

Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer responsible for bringing Overwatch to our screens. The company’s revenue had been fluctuating since 2007 and Overwatch was touted as one of the new hopes for the developer. The game did not disappoint as Blizzard Entertainment announced record revenue of almost 2.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2016, the year that Overwatch was released. The revenue in the ensuing years has remained high, illustrating the boost that the hit game gave its developer. A further success for Activision can be seen in its growing influence in the Asia Pacific market. While the Americas still remains the largest market for the publisher, the revenues within Asia Pacific have almost trebled from 343 million U.S. dollars in 2013 to over one billion U.S. dollars in 2018.