Overwatch broke its own record for online players on Steam thanks to a soft relaunch
Blizzard Entertainment has relaunched Overwatch 2—removing the number from the name—and the game itself has kicked off a new season with new heroes and a dose of story content. Amidst this, the multiplayer shooter has achieved record popularity on Steam.
Overwatch
According to SteamDB, on the evening of February 10, Overwatch peaked at 165,651 concurrent players on Valve's store. This is the best result for the entire time the game has been available on the platform. For comparison, the previous peak was 75,608 concurrent players, which Overwatch achieved in August 2023 when it first debuted on Steam.
Online dynamics of Overwatch on Steam
Notably, after the announcement of the soft relaunch, Steam users began leaving more positive reviews for Overwatch. According to the same SteamDB, in the past week, the game received 1,500 positive reviews and 430 negative ones, whereas the previous week, the ratio was almost equal (about 400 of each type of review). Nevertheless, the game’s overall rating on Steam remains at a "mostly negative" level of 26%.
Ratio of positive (blue) and negative (red) reviews of Overwatch on Steam per day over the last month
How Overwatch has performed on other platforms is unknown. Recall that it is also available on Battle.net and on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch consoles.