Many fan creators operate in a legal grey area profiting from their works on platforms like Patreon (Kretzschmar and Stanfill 2019, cf. Instead, such controversial and transgressive (Mortensen and Jørgensen 2020) fanworks that make up a significant amount of fan labour are actively disavowed via legal action. Other areas of fandom, such as erotic parodies and other sexually explicit materials, are typically not acknowledged despite the game’s creative director’s note about pornographic fanart as ‘an inevitable reality of the internet’ (Grayson 2016b, cf. Footnote 1 It has, among others, hired cosplayers as official ‘representatives’ of new characters during launch events (Carpenter 2018) and regularly shared fan art on official social media accounts as forms of endorsement. As a common corporate response to the works created by fans, some aspects of this fandom are openly endorsed by the game’s developer-publisher Blizzard Entertainment. The game has attracted an enthusiastic and productive fan base that produces derivative as well as transformative works largely building on the game’s ever-expanding roster of diverse characters.
With over 40 million players across the globe, Overwatch is not only a colossus of online gaming but also a notable object of game fandom.
