I don't know what Overwatch is but all the gamers are excited

Mei is a climatologist specializing in polar research, and she's also a character in Blizzard Entertainment's wildly popular first-person arena shooter Overwatch, which launched last Tuesday for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. Normally she's wearing a huge parka, but today she's bent over a chair in the snow and missing her pants. Directly behind her, Soldier: 76, another Overwatch character who sounds like he's trying to channel Christian Bale as Batman, presses his crotch against her.

"Don't get cold feet now," Mei says.

"You're the boss," Soldier: 76 says, gravelly as ever. And thus he commences some Arctic drilling even President Obama is powerless to stop.

But not, perhaps, Blizzard Entertainment. Welcome to the world of Overwatch porn, in which budding animators take the colorful heroes of Blizzard's game and create videos of them giving blowjobs, engaging in anal sex, and, well, filling in the blanks. Some of it, like the Mei and Soldier: 76 scene described above, is actually surprisingly well-animated, at least from a technical standpoint. Thing is, these videos are also disappearing. Over the last couple of days, all the Overwatch porn that flourished on porn sites like Pornhub, XVideos, and RedTube is suddenly going the way of porno theaters on Times Square.

That the porn itself existed was no secret. Kotaku wrote a John Holmes-sized post about it a few days back and Pornhub itself gushed about how searches for Overwatch porn went up by 817 percent on May 4, when the open beta began. Users undressing and animating video game characters in sexual acts is nothing new. It happens with every video game, and as we found out in an interview with one of these nude model creators last year, it's a passion project. For some reason, perhaps because of Blizzard's terrific character design, Overwatch porn is more popular than other video game porn.

Word that videos were being taken down started spreading a couple of days ago when a Reddit user by the name of "spornm" wrote a post describing how a reported violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act led to the removal of one of his porn creations featuring Overwatch's Tracer and Widowmaker and Mass Effect's Liara T'Soni. Blizzard, naturally, was suspected as the origin.