Blizzard’s recently-released team-based multiplayer shooter Overwatch has climbed past 10 million players, and now it seems a number of them may be playing from internet cafes in South Korea.
According to Kotaku, Overwatch has surpassed League of Legends to become the number one game played in South Korean ‘net cafes (or PC bangs) — at least temporarily.
That report is based on the weekly top games chart maintained by Gametrics, which tracks what games are being played in South Korea’s PC bangs. League of Legends has securely held the top spot on Gametrics’ charts for years, so it’s quite notable that Overwatch has edged it out (by a very small margin of roughly one and a half percent) after just over a month on sale.
Incidentally, this also sheds light on why Blizzard has chosen to make a very public showcase of how many people are playing Overwatch, rather than buying it.
Many PC bangs in South Korea seem to have special versions of Overwatch that allow anyone with a Battle.net account to play the game for free — after they’ve paid (usually at an hourly rate) for access to the bang.