Blizzard president teases new Overwatch games
The experience today is just “a very small part of what that IP could be”
Blizzard president J. Allen Brack has said the studio’s looking into the possibility of expanding the Overwatch universe with new games.
The company is currently doubling down on development, with more games in the works that at any point in its near 30-year history.
Brack told Game Informer this strategy is likely to result in both the expansion of existing IP and the creation of new franchises.
“We’ve talked about how we’ve got more games in development than ever before. More games in development than in the entire history of the company,” he said.
“We also think that there are a lot of different types of games that can exist within the IP’s that we have. If we think about the Overwatch IP for example, we think about the Overwatch IP as being extremely large and extremely all-encompassing. Overwatch, the game people experience today, is just being a very small part of what that IP could be.
“We think that a lot of these franchises have the ability to have lots of different types of games, lots of different types of experiences,” Brack said, using Blizzard’s work on the Warcraft franchise, which encompasses real-time strategy, MMO and card games, as an example of what can be done with a rich IP.
“Having said that, it was 18 years between the introduction of Diablo, which is the last Blizzard IP, and the release of Overwatch,” he added. “That’s a long time to go without creating a new franchise. So we want to create more games in our franchises and we do want to think about new franchises as well.”
Brack said recently Blizzard could release more games for Switch following 2018’s port of Diablo 3.
The studio has confirmed it won’t have a booth at Gamescom 2019 in August “as part of a renewed effort this year” to maintain its focus on development.
