Overwatch and pornography
The game's distinct and colorful character designs drew the attention of many online content creators, resulting in sexually explicit fanart.
Original pornography fan artists (animators and illustrators) are most commonly based on social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr, while they upload their works to file hosting services like MEGA, Gfycat, Webmshare, and Google Drive.
Blizzard initially issued cease-and-desist orders to some prolific creators through an independent security firm, though the game's director described the situation as "an inevitable reality of the internet in 2016."
[4] Aoife Wilson of Eurogamer asserted that a cursory search on websites like Pornhub reveals pornography inspired by many high-profile video game franchises.
[4] In early 2016, Blizzard also encountered some controversy with the design of a victory pose for the game's cover art character, Tracer, which was criticised by some fans as "[reducing her] to just another bland female sex symbol.
Nathan Grayson of Kotaku stated that Overwatch makes for "good porn" because of its colorful cast of characters with distinct visual styles.
Grayson wrote that Overwatch pornography is relatively easy to make with Source Filmmaker, the community of which is built around the sharing of assets, including nude models.
[13][14] Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan stated in an interview that he and his team have purposefully kept the romantic relationships and sexual identities of their characters vague in order to not "pander" to the audience.
[3] Many of the Overwatch-related videos on Pornhub during the game's open beta featured the official models of the characters with some slight alterations to show more skin.
Mo Mozuch of iDigitalTimes called the popularity of Mei significant, noting that she initially wouldn't seem as a likely target and that much pornography of her is fairly body positive, describing exaggerations of her form as "more Venus of Willendorf than Barbie.
"[24] On September 12, pornography website YouPorn revealed that Tracer was the second-most searched female video game character on the site, behind only Lara Croft.
"[13] Commenting upon the pornographic content available on the Internet, Aoife Wilson of Eurogamer said that some of the videos are of surprisingly high quality, though she criticized that female characters were commonly portrayed in a submissive manner unless they are depicted with a penis.
Grayson also noted that there exists a lot of comedy in the Overwatch porn scene, with people creating humorous videos or writing silly descriptions.
She elaborated that "It's clear that the people making these videos are into a very specific, predominantly white, and almost always skinny version of women," citing changes made to some characters (such as Pharah and Brigitte being portrayed as whiter and slimmer, respectively, than in-game), as well as an under-representation of others.
[1][26] James Grebey of Inverse called Tumblr "perhaps ground zero for extremely good fanart, heartwarming comics, and other steamy user-generated Overwatch content."
In May 2017, the website sifted through its data in order to determine which character pairings was the most popular on Tumblr, revealing that Cassidy (formerly called "McCree") and Hanzo (McHanzo) were shipped 35% of the time.
This cosplay meetup was highly successful, drawing a large crowd, and the group was asked to leave or cover up by Katsucon staff about an hour in, at which point they moved to a suite in the local MGM Grand for a photoshoot.
"[19] When asked about the pornographic fan content, lead designer Jeff Kaplan stated that as someone who is "creatively responsible" for the franchise, he is concerned and hopes people realize many children play the game despite the T-rating.
"[15] As Overwatch pornography primarily makes use of official character models with appended genitalia, various takedown notices have been issued to creators of such content.
"[4] Both James Stephanie Sterling and VentureBeat's Jeff Grub described the abundance of fan works of Overwatch, pornographic or otherwise, as a good sign for the game's longevity.
