Overwatch was a more popular search term than ‘anal’ on Pornhub in 2016, the porn site has revealed.
The site revealed its annual rundown of stats revealing the world’s porn viewing habits, with Overwatch having become a major hit among its users, overtaking ‘anal,’ ‘hentai,’ ‘celebrity sex tape’ and ‘asian’ in popularity in the US.
Blizzard’s FPS became very popular among the online community almost immediately after its announcement, with many producing fan-fiction and erotic drawings related to its roster of characters, while others began creating unofficial porn featuring the likes of Tracer, Widowmaker & co. using Valve’s video editing application Source Filmmaker (SFM). As such, Overwatch SFM became highly requested by those who wanted to see the stars of Blizzard’s bank-rolling shooter in a distinctly more NSFW setting, leading to an abundance of Overwatch porn in the process.
Blizzard was unhappy with this series of events, with the company issuing takedown notices to the creators of the videos in order to stop the deluge of graphic content featuring their characters. However, they inevitably failed in their mission to prevent the rise of Overwatch porn, and the game now enjoys the odd distinction of being one of the most popular Pornhub search terms of 2016, beating out 452 other categories to become the 16th most searched for term in the US with the list topped by ‘step mom,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘step sister.’
Blizzard closed out the year with the revelation that Tracer, arguably Overwatch‘s most popular character, was a lesbian. In a comic book released just before Christmas, the developer revealed that Tracer was in a romantic relationship with a woman called Emily, which led to a great deal of hang-wringing from an army of online bigots. Blizzard has announced that Tracer has multiple LGBTQ characters, so more are expected to “come out” in 2017.
Meanwhile, actor Terry Crews has started an unofficial campaign for him to voice the character of Doomfist, who is widely rumored to be the next DLC hero released in the game. Encouraging his fans to tweet out their support, Crews has even received a major celebrity backer in the form of The Rock.