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'Overwatch' Really Doesn't Want You to See Its Characters Have Sex

Animated porn videos featuring Blizzard's 'Overwatch' characters once numbered in the thousands; now there are almost none.
Image: Xvideos

Mei is a climatologist specializing in polar research, and she's also a character in Blizzard Entertainment's wildly popular first-person arena shooter Overwatch, which launched last Tuesday for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. Normally she's wearing a huge parka, but today she's bent over a chair in the snow and missing her pants. Directly behind her, Soldier: 76, another Overwatch character who sounds like he's trying to channel Christian Bale as Batman, presses his crotch against her.

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"Don't get cold feet now," Mei says.

"You're the boss," Soldier: 76 says, gravelly as ever. And thus he commences some Arctic drilling even President Obama is powerless to stop.

But not, perhaps, Blizzard Entertainment. Welcome to the world of Overwatch porn, in which budding animators take the colorful heroes of Blizzard's game and create videos of them giving blowjobs, engaging in anal sex, and, well, filling in the blanks. Some of it, like the Mei and Soldier: 76 scene described above, is actually surprisingly well-animated, at least from a technical standpoint. Thing is, these videos are also disappearing. Over the last couple of days, all the Overwatch porn that flourished on porn sites like Pornhub, XVideos, and RedTube is suddenly going the way of porno theaters on Times Square. That the porn itself existed was no secret. Kotaku wrote a John Holmes-sized post about it a few days back and Pornhub itself gushed about how searches for Overwatch porn went up by 817 percent on May 4, when the open beta began. Users undressing and animating video game characters in sexual acts is nothing new. It happens with every video game, and as we found out in an interview with one of these nude model creators last year, it's a passion project. For some reason, perhaps because of Blizzard's terrific character design, Overwatch porn is more popular than other video game porn.

Word that videos were being taken down started spreading a couple of days ago when a Reddit user by the name of "spornm" wrote a post describing how a reported violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act led to the removal of one of his porn creations featuring Overwatch's Tracer and Widowmaker and Mass Effect's Liara T'Soni. Blizzard, naturally, was suspected as the origin.

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Image: Xvideos

PCGamesN discovered the claims of copyright violations are actually coming from a digital security company known as Irdeto USA, and it's currently thought—based only on the specific subject of the content, really—that Blizzard may have outsourced to Irdeto in order to flush this stuff out.

Irdeto certainly hasn't taken down all of it, though, although the search results don't have the potency they once had. When I pulled up a few sites this afternoon, I found only 27 results for Overwatch on Pornhub, 20 on RedTube, and 90 on XVideos. That comes with some qualifications, though, as some of the remaining videos are little more the usual real-life masturbation videos with clickbaity titles like "Tracer Overwatch Cosplayer having some LIVE fun." There's some fun, perhaps, but it's not live and the only connection it has to Overwatch are the viewers who replay the video too much.

The existing searches also seem to prove the purge is specifically aimed at Overwatch, as it's still possible to find considerably raunchier stuff in the same search results featuring World of Warcraft, one of Blizzard's other properties, such as "Sexy Blood Elf Gets Fucked By Huge Worgen Cock."

So why Overwatch? I reached out to Blizzard to find the answer to that very question, but thus far I haven't heard anything (and really expect nothing, as this is a holiday weekend). Some of it, I expect, might be a ghost of the outcry a couple of months back over the character Tracer's sexy rear-view pose (which Blizzard replaced with an arguably sexier pose taken straight from a 1950s pinup by Billy De Vorss). Incidentally, as Pornhub notes, Tracer is the star of most of the available smut.

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But whatever the cause, the news of the takedown has spawned great sadness.

"I don't like the game, but the porn is nice," says a Reddit user named Cryingaidmins in a post from yesterday. "Yesterday there was hundreds on pornhub. Now there is little to none."

For his part, spornm, the Reddit poster who started this all, wants the legions to voice a protest.

"It's the same as Blizzard taking down that tracer art work you drew in class. [it's] them [picking] and choosing which content they want people to see," spornm said. "If you guys are fine with this then, eh, we will go back to making Asari do all sorts of things. But if you enjoy this type of content or any other Blizzard related content then people need to tell Blizzard to stop policing the web; picking and choosing which content they want people to see."

Hang in there, spornm. It'll probably resurge once it lies low for a while. It usually does.