The long under development Overwatch 2 finally went live with a PvP beta this afternoon. Shortly after launch, the first Overwatch broke its previous record with total Twitch viewership in a matter of hours.
In honor of the sequel beta, several high-profile twitch streamers such as Lirik, Myth and especially xQc streamed the first Overwatch. The game peaked at around 450,000 views today, and xQc’s collected over 150,000 views of Overwatch on its own.
Overwatch fans have been waiting to see if they were selected for the Overwatch 2 PVP beta. The only way to access a beta key is to watch partner streamers for a certain amount of time while their Blizzard battle.net account is connected on Twitch. Lucky users can only download a PC beta key until May 17th.
In a tweet from Nathan Grayson of the Washington Postsources have stated that Overwatch has suffered under Activision Blizzard’s aggressive demands for both a successor and an esports league. The company’s well-reported lawsuits in the workplace have not helped either, and there have been several high-profile exits from the company in the past many years.
With over fifty million units sold in the original Overwatch, quite a few are running on Blizzard to develop a worthy successor. For years, fans of Overwatch had seen problems from delayed hero releases to see Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s original game director, leave the company altogether exactly a year ago.
Christian Angeles is a freelance writer for IGN.