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Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller says Blizzard is “really happy” with how the first run of the shooter’s 6v6 mode turned out. To commemorate the occasion, Keller has shared a load of player statistics for the game mode, revealing just how popular it’s already been. With Season 14 looming, the 6v6 mode is also going to return in multiple forms, as it looks like Blizzard is considering whether or not to make the game mode a permanent addition to Overwatch 2 sometime in the future.
If you’re excited to get back into some 6v6 action in Overwatch 2, the new player stats from Keller paint a promising picture of the mode’s future after Season 14. We’ve been stuck with one tank in the multiplayer game for a while, but if 6v6 continues to be this popular, that could all change soon.
“With Overwatch Classic’s first run over, I wanted to give a glimpse of how it did – and give a framework for analyzing upcoming 6v6 tests,” Keller explains. “We look at player engagement in different ways, two of the bigger ones are the % of our audience and the % of hours played in a mode.
“When Classic launched, 36% of all player hours were in that mode! This is high for an event mode. After three weeks of play that number had dropped to about 4%. This is pretty standard for an event mode at the end of its run.”
“The other metric, percent of players, saw 71% of all players try the mode at least once on launch day. This number fell to about 11% by the end of Classic. This falloff is normal, but having 11% of players continue to engage made this our fourth most popular mode at the time.
“Overall we’re really happy with how well Classic did. And we’re excited to bring it back in S14 with a different time period from the original game highlighted. We’re not quite ready to talk about the exact date, but expect it… soon.”
From Keller’s tone and positivity around the OW2 6v6 stats, I’d imagine that Blizzard is starting to consider what a permanent version of the game mode would look like. If this Season 14 experiment does well, we could be looking at a full version later down the line. This next 6v6 experiment will also include multiple ways to play, with both a standard 2-2-2 role queue, and an open queue option. This other version of the queue will feature “min one, max three,” where both teams must have a minimum of one of each role, and a maximum of three.
According to Blizzard, Overwatch 2’s 6v6 mode is returning with Season 14 on Tuesday December 10, but we don’t know when it will be going away again.
If you’re jumping back into Blizzard’s hero shooter be sure to check out our breakdown of the best Overwatch 2 settings on PC, alongside our complete Overwatch 2 tier list.
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