Watching Over Overwatch

On May 5th, Blizzard Entertainment’s hotly anticipated new first-person shooter Overwatch officially entered public beta. We’ve seen other game launches such as Fallout 4 and Minecraft change our visitor’s search habits, so Pornhub’s statisticians teamed up with our friend over at VentureBeat and checked to see if Overwatch had a similar effect. As it turns out, May 5th saw an 817% increase in ‘Overwatch’ searches on our site.

We found other search increases around March 29th and again on April 5th. In the weeks leading up to the public beta, media reported that some character poses in the game were ‘overly sexualized’. Blizzard responded by making modifications and released new poses the following week. The news reports undoubtedly caused people to search for Overwatch and it’s characters.

The most popular Overwatch search is ‘Tracer’, the character who received a new toned-down victory pose. The 3rd most popular search is ‘Overwatch futa’, referring to the hentai term ‘futanari’ meaning a character who mostly appears female but has male genitalia. We found similar ‘futa’ searches when we studied the My Little Pony fetish among Bronies.

Searches for ‘SFM Overwatch’ refer to Source Film Maker, a popular 3D Animation tool which has been used to make many kinds of 3D, parody and fan tribute porn videos. Other Overwatch character searches include ‘Mercy’ and ‘Widowmaker’.

The statistics presented on Pornhub Insights come from Google Analytics. Part of Google’s anonymized data includes ‘affinities’, which determines a users’ likely interests based on their Google search history and web browsing habits. Using this affinity data, we were able to find what type of gaming fans were most likely to search for Overwatch.

Hardcore Gamers came out on top, followed by Roleplaying Fame Fans, Shooter Game Fans and Adventure & Strategy Fans. This seems to be in line with Overwatch’s game genres.

Our statisticians also looked to see what countries were the most likely to search for Overwatch. Topping the list is South Korea, followed by Belarus, Russia, Poland, Chile and Ukraine. Interestingly, these are also some of the top countries we found searching for My Little Pony tribute porn.

Thank-you for checking out this edition of Pornhub Insights. Let us know in the comments what upcoming games you’re hoping to see tribute and parody porn for!