Blizzard says an Overwatch animated series is still possible

Blizzard just gave Overwatch fans the kind of answer that keeps speculation alive without actually delivering a series. Walter Kong, Blizzard’s general manager for Overwatch, said the company would not rule out other narrative experiences in the universe, and that small opening lands as a test of whether Blizzard can still make people believe in Overwatch as more than a live-service shooter with good trailers.

That matters because Blizzard has spent years telling Overwatch’s story in fragments. Since 2016, the franchise has leaned on animated shorts, origin stories, and cinematics to build its identity, with the official video library filling out a shelf of fan-favorite pieces like Recall, Alive, Dragons, and The Last Bastion. The Overwatch 2 era continued that pattern, but the format has always stopped short of the one thing many fans have wanted most: a continuous story they can follow in one place.

The idea of an Overwatch show is hardly new. In February 2020, Nick van Dyk’s LinkedIn profile described an animated Overwatch series as having been developed and sold, while the same reporting said a Diablo series was in pre-production for Netflix. Overwatch’s project never had a distributor attached in that listing, and the broader slate of Blizzard adaptations later ran into the wall of Activision Blizzard’s legal fight with Netflix over the hiring of former CFO Spencer Neumann.

That dispute helped derail momentum. Netflix announced Neumann’s hiring in December 2018, while he was still halfway through the three-year Activision contract he had signed in May 2017. Activision Blizzard then sued Netflix in December 2020 over the poaching claim, and later coverage tied the collapse of Blizzard’s adaptation plans to that fight. By 2024, reporting linked planned animated projects for Overwatch, StarCraft, and Diablo to the same broken relationship.

So Kong’s comment is bigger than a cautious non-answer. Blizzard is signaling that it still understands what the fan base has been asking for, and that it has not shut the door on transmedia storytelling altogether. For Overwatch, an animated series would need to do more than decorate the brand between patches. It would have to deepen character relationships, widen the worldbuilding, and give the universe the kind of narrative spine the shorts have only hinted at. After years of stalled storytelling, that is the real credibility test.