Not content to simply provide a gargantuan video library of people doin’ the dirty, Pornhub’s “Insights” blog has spent all of 2016 cataloging the rise and fall of various pornographic trends. In August, they noticed a correlation between the Olympic Games and a 15% increase in porn searches in Rio De Janiero. In July, they grimly informed us that the worldwide phenomenon of Pokémon Go had translated to a 136% rise in searches for “Pokémon” on the porn website.
In their yearly round-up of statistics, which went up on the Insights blog last week, Pornhub revealed that at least one esport had finally arrived in the world of adult entertainment. Overwatch was the eleventh most searched term in 2016, above anal, hentai, and “celebrity sex tape.”
I’ve talked a lot about Overwatch’s meteoric rise in the world of competitive gaming, achieving a $300,000 prize pool and more players per month than Dota 2 less than a year after its release. It seems only appropriate, in that case, that Overwatch’s ascent through the ranks of internet pornography has been equally speedy, jumping 452 spots from its place in 2015 to land in the top 20 last year.
This number is even more impressive, considering the unique hurdle creators of Overwatch porn have faced. Most raunchy Overwatch content, especially of the kind that turns up on Pornhub, is made using Valve’s Source Filmmaker, which lets people animate 3D scenes with relative ease. Creators need access to the actual models to make animations in Source, though, something that Blizzard made difficult: leading up to the game’s release date, the developer allegedly began citing copyright infringement to take down websites and target artists using models from the game. While they’ve eased off somewhat, Blizzard is clearly trying to maintain the “T for Teen” rating of their game, and they’re not happy about the
Copyright claims may be able to hamstring independent creators, but there’s still an abundance of Overwatch porn available, both on Pornhub and elsewhere. Blizzard can fight all it wants, but they’d do well to remember the cautionary tale of Erin Esurance, whose fan-drawn smut actually overtook Esurance’s ad campaign in Google’s search results. If the internet has its heart set on something, there’s almost nothing even a corporation of Blizzard’s size can do—especially if that something is fuck-adjacent.
