Overwatch 2 Has Already Broken an Overwatch Record

Overwatch 2’s beta just launched this week and has already managed to shatter a record previously held by the original Overwatch game. The beta kicked off on the PC platform on Thursday and nearly instantly set a new viewership record on Twitch by amassing well over 1 million spectators who were looking to either see more of the game, its new hero and hero reworks, or to simply score access to the beta themselves.

According to the aptly named Twitch Tracker site which keeps up with all of these different games, channels, and all the stats related to them, the Overwatch category over on Twitch boasts 1,359,128 live viewers at the time this is being written. The actual Twitch page for the game currently has that number at a bit higher than that with it saying there are 1.4 million viewers tuning in to streams.

While it’s indeed the Overwatch category, it’s Overwatch 2 that’s being played under that umbrella on Twitch since there’s not a dedicated Overwatch 2 category being used at this time. Whether it’s actually 1.4 million viewers watching the Overwatch 2 gameplay now or just shy of that as Twitch Tracker suggested, the amount of people watching now is well over the previous record Twitch Tracker showed which saw 439,152 people watching the original Overwatch back in January 2018. Even if you were to cut out the people who are actually playing Overwatch and not Overwatch 2 right now, it’d still be an easy victory for the latter in terms of viewership records.

Much of that buzz around the game deals with two factors: The fact that so many high-profile streamers are currently playing Overwatch 2 and the fact that watching them play the game is the easiest way to guarantee yourself a beta key. The streamers currently sitting in the top three spots in the Overwatch category are xQc with 273k viewers, A_Seagull with 132k, and mL7support with 98.5k. those numbers go down from there, but those top three spots alone are enough to break the previous record by themselves.

Blizzard partnered with Twitch to give out beta keys through Twitch Drops, but only after people watched four hours of gameplay which is more than Twitch Drops typically require. If you imagine people want to play badly enough that they keep a stream on for that long, of course that’d lead to some lofty viewership numbers. But the beta’s currently only on the PC platform anyway which means there are likely plenty of people who won’t be playing there but still want to tune in to see what the game’s like.

Overwatch 2 does not yet have a set release date, but you can hop in to try it out now if you’ve gotten a beta key.