About Counterwatch

How Counterwatch got started

I was burnt out from my last startup and wanted to do something just for fun. I had recently started maining Doomfist and was frustrated with suddenly getting flashbanged by a Cassidy out of nowhere, because I didn't notice that they swapped. I thought I could find some way to solve this.

Overwolf had just released Overwatch support, so I decided to throw together a POC that would notify me when players swapped heroes, until Blizzard started listening to player feedback and did it themselves. I showed it to some friends, they wanted to try it, and the rest is history.

I always wanted to add match tracking but that took a bit longer to build. The website has been something I've dreamed of making since I was building the POC, and I'm very excited to see it come to fruition now, thanks to the popularity of the app.

Who makes it

Counterwatch is built by me, a solo developer working out of Stockholm, Sweden. Most of the code, the data pipeline, and this website is written by one person, which is why the surface area moves slowly and deliberately.

You can reach me at oskar@counterwatch.gg or on Discord. I read every message that comes in.

Where the data comes from

Every community win rate, counter matchup, synergy pair, tier placement, and map stat on counterwatch.gg is computed from real match outcomes recorded by the Counterwatch app. I do not scrape public APIs. I do not accept user-submitted results. The numbers on the site are real matches played by real people who installed the app and agreed to the terms when they signed up.

Before any win rate is displayed it is passed through Bayesian shrinkage, which pulls low-sample heroes toward a neutral 50% baseline until the sample is big enough to trust. That keeps a hero with five matches at 100% from floating to the top of the tier list. The full write-up on the math is on the methodology page.

Privacy and data handling

The tracked data is match-level: outcomes, hero picks, map, and mode. I do not track chat, voice, or anything that ties back to a specific player publicly on the website. The privacy policy has the full legal treatment.

Why free

The core experience is free and stays free: the in-game overlay, the second-screen window, the web tier lists, the team builder, the hero pages. Counterwatch offers optional Plus and Premium subscriptions for people who want extra personal-stats features and want to support development, but none of the community-stats tooling or counter-pick features are gated behind a paywall. The site and the core app will always work without paying.