Overwatch: the cool new videogame is inspiring a ton of porn

And they weren't left wanting either, a casual search for 'overwatch' on Pornhub throws up 82 results of some extremely fascinating content. The videos aren't live-action like the various parodies that dot the landscape of Smuttsville, such as the timeless classic Buffy The Vampire Layer. Instead, they're all fully animated and created by fans of the game itself.

Even more surprising, for a game that's been open to the public for just the last few weeks, Overwatch porn has existed since the game was in its closed beta phase. In fact, there have been over 600,000 searches for Overwatch porn on Pornhub since the turn of the year.

But people getting off to animated porn isn't new. Usually based on popular cartoons or animated movies, animated porn has existed for as long as animation has. Videogames being used as masturbatory fodder though, especially on the levels of Overwatch, is less heard of.

While certain sexualised female game characters, like Lara Croft from the popular Tomb Raider franchise, managed to become sex icons, gaming isn't something traditionally associated with sexual arousal. After all, when was the last time you had a friend lure you into a gaming session with the promise of hot women or men?

The thing is that, for too long, videogame characters were just an extension of the gamer or obstacles to overcome. Now, especially with games like Overwatch, where the characters are both personality-driven as well as aesthetically pleasing, they have unique identities that gamers legitimately feel drawn to. In fact, the top requested Overwatch porn query was 'Overwatch Tracer', Tracer being one of the more popular in-game characters.

The making of the porn as well, is an interesting process. While making regular porn is accessible to anyone with a camera, making an animated porno should obviously be more challenging. However, one of the factors that has contributed to Overwatch porn's popularity is how easy it is to make.

Creators mostly use Valve's Source Filmmaker, a 3D animation tool that's fairly easy to use. Models for characters are available for free download thanks to the free-sharing Source Filmmaker community.

The models are especially accurate as well because Source Filmmakers involved in the closed beta testing of the game took to ripping character models straight from the game.

Once that was done, other members of the community worked on tweaking the models to produce versions with different outfits, ripped outfits and characters with a complete lack of outfits as well.

With all these models at one's disposal, one needn't even be an artist to rustle up some animated sexual shenanigans.

This has led to various types of Overwatch porn, from more tackily produced four or five second loops to longer, more story-driven plots with actual voice-acting and some phenomenal animation.

But while the gaming community is enjoying it, Blizzard is far less happy. While refusing to comment publicly on it, the company has actively tried to remove any such content on grounds of copyright from various websites. It's an understandable decision given they don't want to lose the teenage and tween market, even if it seems like a move doomed at the outset for failure. Because, at the end of the day, videogame porn is only gaining in popularity.

While you'd imagine it's a phenomenon restricted to a small community, Pornhub's data proves otherwise. Overwatch porn alone was consumed in multiple countries, from gaming-mad South Korea to Colombia and even Belarus.

Overwatch isn't the first game to go viral on Pornhub though. In fact, it isn't even the most popular. Call of Duty, Halo and even Clash of Clans outstrip it in terms of popularity. But it's Pornhub's data from Minecraft porn that offers the biggest clue to which way this trend is headed. Data on Minecraft-related porn showed that 80% of the users searching for Minecraft porn were in the technologically savvy 18-24 age group.

With every subsequent generation increasingly exposed to technology, and with videogames getting bigger, better and more popular, it only means more interesting porn. And that's never a bad thing.

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