It’s the battle of the free FPS games, as Valve’s Team Fortress 2 has briefly overtaken Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 in terms of concurrent Twitch viewers. With multiple reasons for the spike in viewers that overtook OW2, and the Blizzard shooter’s impending Steam release, it looks like it could be in for some friendly competition with Team Fortress 2 going forward.
Team Fortress 2, the Valve multiplayer stalwart, briefly overtook Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 in peak concurrent viewers on Twitch today, Monday, July 24. While Team Fortress 2 has always been a steady success on Steam, with an Overwatch 2 Steam release to join the Valve shooter soon, it hasn’t been able to pull in the same number of Twitch viewers, until now.
According to Twitch Tracker, Team Fortress 2 pulled in a staggering 33,712 concurrent Twitch viewers at 1 am on July 24, while Overwatch 2 pulled in 16,072 viewers at the exact same time.
Overwatch 2 has more average viewers, and the success of Team Fortress 2 against Blizzard’s own shooter could very well be short-lived, but it’s still staggering to see.
The Team Fortress 2 jump in Twitch viewership seems to have come from two places. First of all, Valve released a “holiday-sized update” with new maps, taunts, items, and more for the free-to-play shooter. This saw the player count jump to its highest-ever level, beating out the previous peak of 167,591 for a new peak of 253,997. In fact, Team Fortress 2 is currently floating at around 100,000 concurrent players on Steam thanks to the update.
This alone didn’t cause the massive spike in Twitch viewership though, as Twitch streamer Jerma985 decided to play the game on stream alongside fellow streamer ster, which brought up the TF2 numbers massively.
Jerma’s stream alone brought in a maximum of 29.5k viewers at one time, while ster brought in 4.8k.
As mentioned, Blizzard does plan on bringing the free-to-play Overwatch 2 to Steam (it’s previously just been on Battle.net) very soon, so it’ll be interesting to see what numbers it does on Valve’s platform, especially compared to the recent success of TF2.
Overwatch 2 will be splitting a playerbase between two PC launchers, as Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has said the game will run directly through Steam if you play it there, but it’s currently unclear how Steam will track the numbers across PC itself.
Do keep in mind as well that overall Overwatch 2 has been eclipsing TF2 with its Twitch viewership. Just earlier this week Overwatch 2 had over 45,000 concurrent viewers, while TF2 had around 10,000 at the same time. You can see all the stats for yourself on Twitch Tracker.
If replaying or watching Team Fortress 2 has you in the mood for some similar classic Valve experiences, we’ve got the very best of PC classics and old games broken down that you should still be playing today. We’ve also got the very best multiplayer games if TF2 or Overwatch 2 aren’t quite to your tastes.
