Overwatch 2 Player Count – How Many People Still Play OW 2?

It’s fair to say that Overwatch 2 has had a tricky start as a game. After cancelling much anticipated PVE content, and the shutdown of the OWL, players could be forgiven for expecting the game to have taken a bit of a hit. according to a recent interview though, the executive producer says the OW 2 player count is healthy and even growing. It seems the developers’ recent changes to try and bolster the free-to-play shooter have paid off.

While promised content that long-time fans were excited to see has had to be cut, Blizzard has become living up to other commitments recently. They’ve begun to deliver reworks of older Heroes. Their approach to the patches you’ll see in OW news also seems to be doing a better job of keeping the game engaging. That’s along with more collaborations and even changes to pricing coming. All these moves to try and improve the general user experience for Overwatch 2 might have worked. A new interview has given us quite a few more details, which point to OW 2 being in a much healthier place.

It looks like the OW 2 player count is in a healthier place right now. How many people are still playing OW 2 though?

OW 2 Player Count
The Overwatch 2 player count has been a source of speculation for players for quite a while. It’s always difficult tog et exact information for games like this since developers don’t tend to release exact figures. In late 2023, we did get some decent information about the current player count though.

Speaking in a new interview, Jared Neuss has detailed quite a bit more about OW 2 player count. While the game at one point held records for most negative reviews, it seems the player numbers have held out. Speaking specifically of Steam, the executive producer of Overwatch 2 said “Not only are people jumping in for the first time on Steam, but people are coming back and making Steam their primary platform”. It seems there’s still a decent number of players sticking around on Steam, even after the game got so many poor reviews.

Talking more generally about the overall audience between OW 1 and the OW 2 player count, Neuss said “The game is doing really well. The audience has grown significantly… We have a really healthy mix of people who’ve been playing Overwatch for a long time and brand new players”. They’ve identified this as a success in their goals for going free to play.

What Does the Player Count Look Like?
General positive sentiments in interviews are something, but what do we actually know about the player base of OW 2? It is difficult to quantify in some terms. Blizzard doesn’t reveal exact numbers. We can see player numbers on platforms like Steam, but it doesn’t tell the full story when most legacy OW players are more used to using Blizzard’s own launcher. Between that and console, the Steam player numbers aren’t entirely representative of the game.

In terms of the publicly available Steam data, the game’s player numbers peaked in the month of its release on this platform. It achieved 75,361 peak players in August. It lost a considerable number of players in September, falling to a low with a peak of 33,000. However, in both October and November, it saw increased monthly highs. In December it roughly went up by about 0.03 percent. However, that’s still a gain technically. It shows that while some attention died off initially, OW 2’s Steam player base is growing.

If the Steam numbers are indicative of the player base elsewhere, this is a healthy sign for the future of the game. It faced some early problems. However, Blizzard’s current innovations and changes to the game continue to bring in new and returning players. Big changes come next year like the much-anticipated monetization fixes. We might see even more people return to the OW 2 player count.