According to reports from Korean news site MTN, Blizzard are working with a new partner on upcoming games for both their Overwatch and StarCraft IPs.
Allegedly, the publishing giants hosting a bidding war in South Korea with multiple major Korean game companies including Guild Wars 2 makers NCSoft and Arena of Valor publishers Netmarble. However, news has now emerged that Blizzard have decided to team up with Nexon who are best known for first-person shooter The Finals and currently hold the publishing rights to the MapleStory franchise.
This bidding was taking place towards the end of 2024 with publishers offered a package deal of development rights for a new game using the Starcraft IP as well as the Korean and Japanese distributing rights for Overwatch Mobile which has supposedly been in development for a while. With all of the nostalgia surrounding the StarCraft IP in South Korea and the general popularity of Overwatch, these were fiercely contested negotiations.
The hero shooter Overwatch is finally close to a mobile release which would make it a direct rival to Valorant Mobile, which was revealed by Riot Games last week, though that is launching exclusively in China first. However, dubbed “Overwatch 3” during the bidding process, this new Overwatch game may not be a shooter as the MTN report (when translated) suggests that it will, in fact, be a MOBA game for mobile devices, meaning it would rival Riot’s League of Legends Wild Rift instead.
It’s also unclear what genre the new StarCraft game will be. During bidding, this was supposedly a complicated part of each company’s pitch as it’s difficult to surpass Blizzard’s own StarCraft II in the RTS genre and while the MOBA and TCG genres were reportedly considered, it seems likely that Nexon have decided to go a different direction.
Last year, Blizzard posted multiple job listings for a new StarCraft game and many of these listings referenced the new titles as an “open-world shooter game” which could be linked to this new Nexon project. Though it’s also entirely possible that this new shooter is a project being worked on by Blizzard directly and is separate to what Nexon have began working on.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
