Overwatch becomes 10 times bigger on Tumblr than any other game in just one year

It’s hard to believe that Overwatch is just a year old — it’s become that big of a phenomenon. There are few places where it’s more popular than Tumblr, where fans share art, fiction and all the best GIFs based on the game. A new post from the company’s fandom-centric blog reveals that Overwatch is so big on the social media site, its hashtag has had more engagements than every single TV show, movie or video game over the last year.

From May 23 until May 18, just before the game’s first birthday, Tumblr saw nearly 150 million engagements for the Overwatch tag. That puts it in the second slot for biggest trending topics over that time period, according to the Fandometrics blog.

In context, that’s astounding, the post explained. Not only was the next closest video game-related Tumblr tag 18 spots away on the list (it was #Pokémon, unsurprisingly), but Overwatch even trumped some way more common tags.

“That’s trendier than every TV show and film, and even bigger, more generic tags like #GIF (No. 5) and #art (No. 7),” the Fandometrics blog explained.

That’s wild, but Tumblr broke down the data even further to help explain how this might be possible. Overwatch has a huge shipping community — as in, people who like to couple characters up and create content based on their non-canonical relationships — and the Fandometrics post makes that abundantly clear.

“You can find a ship chart for just about any combination you can think of — a possible 276 unique combinations,” according to the post. We’re going to leave that math up to Tumblr, which gave the top 10 most popular ships on the website. In the first place spot by a large margin is “McHanzo,” as fans call when pairing up McCree and Hanzo.

Also on that list are several pairings featuring Mercy, Tumblr’s most popular support character; Genji, Hanzo’s (way more attractive, in our opinion) brother; and Junkrat, the lovable outlaw.

The whole post has more data to pore over, especially if you want easy access to some good fan art for all 24 playable Overwatch heroes.