Overwatch, Blizzard’s first-person shooter, is incredibly popular among girls and women. “In our data,” game demographics expert Nick Yee wrote in a recent blog post, “it is 16% female gamers. So that puts it at more than double the genre average for FPS games.”



QuanticFoundry, Nick’s analytics firm, has collected surveys of 300,000 gamers, which is where he gets this data. Overall, Overwatch is about as popular with female gamers as males: “As a raw count ranking of how many gamers mention Overwatch in the survey," he tells me, "the game is 7th among male gamers, and 12th among female gamers.”

16% percent may not seem like a lot, but for a game as popular as Overwatch, that means millions of extra players, compared to sausage-centric franchises like Call of Duty or Battlefield. And dollars: Since Overwatch has sold over 30 million copies, the game’s female user base is about 5 million -- who’ve given Blizzard roughly $250 million.

Among them is Annette, a 20-something from Denver, pictured here rocking her cosplay as Overwatch character Symmetra. Her username is “fevercadence” and if you’ve played against her, she has probably kicked your ass: Her highest rank this season is Diamond.

A group of female friends she knows through Second Life first got her into it: “I had so much fun in our group games that I fell in love and preordered it once beta was over,” she tells me. “There's so much diversity in the characters in both gender and race, which is great for us cosplayers!” She also loves how much Overwatch emphasizes teamwork: “I've played some other games where one person can just dominate the entire game without needing their team, but it's a lot harder to do that in Overwatch. I often play competitively so I like being exposed to that kind of coordination.”

“Most shooters don't have female protagonists, so that's one” reason for its cross-gender popularity, Nick Yee tells me. He cites a couple other factors that surprised me, but are frankly really cool: