A decade of fan pleas may finally be getting somewhere. Walter Kong, the general manager steering Overwatch at Blizzard, stopped short of dismissing the possibility of an animated series based on the hero shooter, signaling that the studio remains open to expanding the franchise beyond its core competitive game.
"I would not rule it out," Kong said when asked directly about the prospect of an Overwatch TV adaptation. The comment came in response to a consistent drumbeat of fan demand that plays out every time the studio releases new content. "Every time we release assets, whether it's a hero trailer or an event piece, there are all of these comments about, 'Hey, we would love an Overwatch animated series. Blizzard, what the hell? When's that happening?'" Kong noted.
The appetite is real. Kong acknowledged that viewer enthusiasm for more Overwatch storytelling represents genuine market demand. "So we certainly hear that and I think that it is not a huge stretch to believe that there would be a lot of demand for that type of content. So certainly, no, I won't rule out that sometime in the future there could be other storytelling experiences in the Overwatch universe," he explained.
The path to such a project has been rocky. In 2024, journalist Jason Schreier's book "Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment" revealed that Blizzard had negotiated Netflix deals for animated adaptations of StarCraft, Overwatch, and Diablo. Those efforts collapsed after a legal dispute. In early 2019, Spencer Neumann, who was Blizzard's CFO at the time, left the company and joined Netflix in the same role, breaching his contract in the process. The resulting lawsuit apparently torpedoed the entire Netflix partnership and its slate of Blizzard adaptations.
Overwatch itself is marking a milestone this year: a full decade since launch. The shooter has logged over 4.4 billion matches in that span, yet the hunger for deeper narrative content persists. That demand went unmet for years as Blizzard struggled with its own ambitions for the game.
Kong admitted the studio overextended itself at launch. The team released cinematic trailers before the game dropped to build emotional investment in the world and characters. What followed was a harsh lesson in resource allocation. "I think they helped establish that kind of emotional resonance prior to the games launch, but what we weren't prepared for was being able to support so many ambitions," Kong said. The studio wanted both a steady stream of competitive content and elaborate story missions. "I think we really underestimated the level of resources necessary to hit with all of that ambition," he added.
By late 2021, when Kong took over as general manager, the game was drowning in unmet commitments. He made the hard call to prioritize PvP content over narrative expansions. That decision accelerated the shift toward Overwatch 2's free-to-play model and competitive focus.
An attempt to revive story missions in Season 6 of 2023 fizzled. Players simply didn't connect with the narrative content the way they had embraced the core competitive experience. Kong pulled back again, doubling down on PvP.
These days, Kong's vision for Overwatch expansion takes different forms. The franchise recently crossed over into Fortnite, a collaboration Kong himself spearheaded. His prior experience at Epic from 2018 to 2020 made him familiar with the power of surprise crossovers to electrify both franchises. "I felt that the time was right to just bring a bit of excitement to the overall franchise and perhaps expose our heroes to some new audiences," Kong said. "Quickly we felt that our heroes would be presented in a very positive way and as the work developed, that feeling got reinforced and overall we were very, very happy with how the collaboration delivered."
Kong has been itching to push Overwatch's heroes beyond the game itself for years, but held back until the competitive foundation felt solid. "That has been the ambition pretty much from the beginning, but I felt that it could not be done until the core game experience of Overwatch was at a certain level of health and ability to serve our players was at the right place," he explained. With the game now stabilized and his team running smoothly, Kong has more bandwidth to explore opportunities that take years to develop. He hinted at other projects in the pipeline but declined to elaborate.
Whether an animated series is among them remains unclear. For now, Blizzard is content with the current direction. Kong said he is "happy with where the game is today," and the studio will be banking on that momentum to carry it forward.
Author Emily Chen: "Kong's refusal to rule out an animated series sounds like corporate politeness until you remember Blizzard actually had Netflix deals in the works and nuked them over a CFO dispute; the real question isn't if they want to make the show, but whether they can manage their ambitions better than they did last time."
Comments