Overwatch Beta Most Successful in Blizzard's History

There's a decent chance you were aware of this already, but last week Blizzard hosted an open beta for Overwatch, which spanned across the PC, Xbox One, and PS4 versions of the game. When I say "decent chance", I should have probably said "statistically probable", as Blizzard has just released a "thank you" to congratulate players for creating the largest open beta in the company's entire history.

9.7 million players tuned in to the beta, spending a grand total of 4.9 billion minutes (or 81 million hours) thoroughly playing through the game. That beats out the open betas for Blizzard's other games, like Diablo and Starcraft, by a massive margin. Which, while impressive on paper, kind of becomes less so when you consider that this is the first time Blizzard has had an open beta on three systems, PC, Xbox One, and PS4, rather than just one: the good ol' PC.

So with more systems comes a wider audience, and there's the fact that Overwatch is just straight-up more accessible than the other games, being a fairly straightforward arena-based FPS. Which would make it especially more popular with the aforementioned console audience, which tends to gravitate strongly towards FPS titles like this.

Still. Even if the record-breaking number is explainable, that doesn't make it any less cool. Did any of you get to try to Open Beta? Enjoy it? Think it'll be the next big FPS game?

...Think about it, I guess?