Blizzard President J. Allen Brack has been making the rounds to talk about the company and its future. Through him we know that Blizzard apparently has more games in development right now than at any point in its storied history. He’s also hinted that those games could be related to their current staple of highly successful IPs. And now we have an even clearer picture of which IP we might see a new game from soon- Overwatch, which Blizzard have actually hinted at before.
In an interview with Game Informer, Allen talked about the philosophy Blizzard has adopted with their IPs. He singled out Overwatch, the hero-based shooter that Blizzard launched in 2016. While he doesn’t outright say it, he seems to be teasing pretty heavily that something new is coming from the IP.
“We also think that there are a lot of different types of games that can exist within the IP’s that we have,” he said. “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 continued, using Blizzard’s work on the Warcraft franchise, which encompasses real-time strategy, an 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.”
Whether or not he’s referring to a spinoff or a more direct sequel is anyone’s guess. Time will have to tell, and BlizzCon is getting pretty close. Overwatch is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
