BlizzCon 2026 to include the return of the Overwatch World Cup

Darragh Harbinson, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 06/11/2025

Blizzard has announced the details for BlizzCon 2026, with esports taking several prominent spots in the calendar.

Most notably, the tournament features the return of the Overwatch World Cup, where players represent their countries on the BlizzCon stage.

Other titles represented in esports action include World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Warcraft III, Starcraft II, and Heroes of the Storm.

“Experience the best in esports with major competition including the Overwatch World Cup, World of Warcraft Arena World Championship, World of Warcraft Mythic Dungeon International, Hearthstone Masters Tour World Championship, and the inaugural Blizzard Classic Cup.”

Overwatch World Cup returns for 2026

The Overwatch World Cup has historically been a hugely popular product amongst Overwatch fans.

Overwatch World Cup’s inaugural tournament in 2016 was among the most popular esports events of the year, garnering huge interest from curious fans of the new Blizzard property.

The event captured 231,994 peak viewers for its first event, with 2017’s iteration being the most-watched version of the tournament with 321,960 peak viewers.

The numbers were strong for the period, but it is hard to quantify the excitement and momentum early Overwatch events had at that time.

However, as the years have gone by, the importance of Overwatch in the zeitgeist has waned considerably.

Fans were put off by unpopular meta shifts, by the difficulty of following the action, and by Blizzard’s decision-making, culminating in the highly unpopular launch of Overwatch 2.

Still, fans have embraced the announcement of the game’s return, in part due to BlizzCon’s absence in 2024 and 2025.

That absence has seemingly given time for nostalgia to set in and for excitement to grow.

As they say, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ For Overwatch fans, that seems to be the case for their World Cup event.

Other esports at BlizzCon 2026

Other esports tournaments at the event include World of Warcraft (WoW) Mythic Dungeon International, where teams of raiders race to complete Mythic+ dungeons.

WoW is also represented in the World of Warcraft Arena Championship, a PvP competition between WoW’s greatest brawlers.

Hearthstone Masters Tour World Championship returns, this time for the first time since 2019. Hearthstone’s constructed mode was once hugely popular, with its esports gaining some notoriety.

Recently, the autobattler gamemode ‘Battlegrounds’ has become the more dominant mode, so Blizzard may try to attract some of its old personalities to help promote the competition.

Lastly, the Blizzard Cup will be contested for the first time. Blizzard explains the competition as follows:

“The Blizzard Classic Cup brings Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft: Remastered, StarCraft 2, and WarCraft III back to the BlizzCon stage for two days of thrilling competition.

“Community captains will draft all-star teams across these iconic titles to battle for glory on the new Blizzard Classic Stage located in the Blizzard Arcade.”

The competition will be welcome news for Blizzard’s old-school fans, with SC2 especially being a pioneering title in the history of esports.

StarCraft 2 and StarCraft Brood Wars were the central titles of the first generation of Korea’s ‘Telecom Wars,’ the rivalry between KT and SKT/T1.

The next iteration of that rivalry will take place shortly at the League of Legends Worlds 2025 Grand Final.

Darragh Harbinson, Senior Editor

Darragh Harbinson is an esports writer specialising in Counter-Strike. He has written for Esports News UK, Esports Insider, UKCSGO, Dexerto, and Rush B Media.

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