At the end of the year, we usually hear about a few interesting statistics based on the big games of the past 12 months and today is no different. When it comes to games that are paid for, IE. cost money up front and don't make all of their funds from aesthetic or other content purchases after the fact, Overwatch took most of the pie.
While games like Fallout 4 earned a lot of money - pulling in some $75 million for developers, and Minecraft continued to do well, earning Microsoft just shy of $89 million in direct sales alone, Overwatch was miles ahead of them.
In fact it even beat out Counter Strike: Global Offensive, which had another great year, earning Valve $257 million throughout 2016.
Overwatch however earned more than double that, bringing in $585 million for Blizzard. That is an ungodly amount of money. In fact it's ten percent of the entire PC gaming market, which is thought to be worth close to 5.5 billion.
What's even more impressive, is that this is a game that was released way after all of the others on the list. It was released in May this year, which means it missed out on sales throughout those first five months.
That's a hell of a lot of capital that should give us an idea of the direction Blizzard will go in the future. It's also heartening to see games that aren't free to play, micro-transaction messes, still making good money in gaming.
