The launch of Overwatch 2 today has had no shortage of issues with long queue times and swathes of players reporting being disconnected numerous times, but that isn’t preventing them from seeking the game out in other ways.
With so many people having trouble getting in themselves, Overwatch 2 has posted massive viewership numbers, peaking at more than half a million concurrent viewers.
For comparison, Overwatch only eclipsed that mark one time in its history, according to Sully Gnome, and it was for the Overwatch 2 beta this past April. The OW2 beta helped the game’s Twitch category hit a peak of 1.46 million concurrent viewers on April 27.
As one might expect, the creator with the most viewers has been former Overwatch League pro xQc, who has steadily maintained more than 100,000 viewers in the category at the time of writing.
Other top OW2 players streaming the title are familiar faces that aren’t necessarily known for loading up into the class-based shooting game too. Twitch mainstays like Asmongold, Moistcr1tikal, and Lirik have all hovered around 20,000 viewers as well, putting them at the top of the newly-minted broadcast category.
The Overwatch 2 launch has been anything but clean though.
While servers quietly opened slightly before the publicized launch time of 2pm CT, queue times and disconnections have plagued the first few hours of the game’s life.
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra took to Twitter just hours following the game’s launch to acknowledge that OW2 is experiencing server issues. In a post, he added the game is experiencing a “mass DDoS attack” that is causing the problem.
