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This week, T is Tanking, G and Z take Offense as they all push the payload towards the goal: Discovering what is the appeal of Overwatch, and what makes people a fan of it. Are there fans that try to embody characters when they play? Why is Hanzo maining a bad thing? How did fan's react to Tracer's girlfriend? All this and more as we dig into the fandom!
Next week, SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT: We'll be talking about fans of Rick and Morty (with a special guest)!
## Episode outline
### Fandom Facts
**History and Origins:**
Overwatch is a class-based, online first-person shooter (FPS) developed by Blizzard Entertainment released in May 2016. Mechanically, the game consists of two teams of six "heroes" each working towards some objective depending on the game mode. There are over twenty heroes, each with their own unique abilities and skills broadly grouped into "offense", "defense", "tank", and "support" roles.
As far as the story of the game:
> Soldiers. Scientists. Adventurers. Oddities.
>
> In a time of global crisis, an international task force of heroes banded together to restore peace to a war-torn world: Overwatch.
>
> It ended the crisis and helped to maintain peace in the decades that followed, inspiring an era of exploration, innovation, and discovery. But after many years, Overwatch's influence waned, and it was eventually disbanded.
>
> Overwatch is gone… but the world still needs heroes.
>
> Now, conflict is rising across the world again, and the call has gone out to heroes old and new. Are you with us?
>
> — [Fanlore - Overwatch](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Overwatch)
**Search Data:**
Looking at the [search data for Overwatch](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F0128442n), search interest in the game has been on a slow decline since about August of 2016, but still remains fairly popular. The largest spike in popularity occurred in May 2016, which likely coincides with the open beta of the game.
The top ten countries, by search volume, are: South Korea (by a large margin), Singapore, Finland, Sweeden, Norway, Canada, Australia, United States, Taiwan, and New Zealand.
**Size of Fandom:**
Looking at some of the data...
- Approximately 1.1 million subscribers on [r/overwatch](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/)
- Over 138 000 subscribers on [r/CompetitiveOverwatch](https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/)
- Almost 120 000 subscribers on [r/OverwatchUniversity](https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchUniversity/)
- As of last January, the game itself [had over 25 million players](https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/27/14417214/how-many-people-play-overwatch-25-million)
Easily, the number of fans **is in the tens of millions**.
**Fan Demographics:**
There seems to be no shortage of sites that will give details on the _characters_, but not so much on the players. For example, [Overwatch Tracker](https://overwatchtracker.com/insights) offers data on hero playtime and skill rankings, and from that we can see some general data points about the _game_.
However, we're more interested in the _players_. From [this thread in the Overwatch subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4ngttm/overwatch_demographic_survey_lets_get_some_data/), we can get _some_ data from its over 3000 respondents:
- **Gender:** 83.3% Male, 14.9% Female
- **Age:** Almost 70% of respondents are under the age of 24
- **Frequency:** Almost 50% of respondents play every day; just over 30% play 3-5 times a week
A slightly different investigation on [Gender Influence in Hero Choice](https://inkspire.org/post/does-gender-influence-hero-choice-in-overwatch-data-analysis/-KnvQU-V6c9xnp7RSxod) puts the number of female players closer to 21% (and provides some other interesting data).
**Fast Facts:**
- Overwatch has almost 22 000 fan works on [Archive Of Our Own](https://archiveofour...
