New Trademark Registered to Blizzard – Overwatch

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

I’m going to put a disclaimer on this article that first and foremost, this was registered on April 1 and as has been proven in the past with The Dark Below and Corgi’s Unleashed, it’s super easy to fake this kind of stuff.

Disclaimer out of the way, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Blizzard has registered for a trademark for “Overwatch” which is described as “Entertainment services, namely, providing on-line computer games; providing computer games that may be accessed via a global computer network.”

The description is fairly similar to their Reaper of Souls and Warlords of Draenor trademarks Blizzard registered for last year.

If we were to believe this trademark is a real one registered by Blizzard, this might be the first glimpse we have in what Michal Booth – Game Director for an unannounced Blizzard game that is NOT Titan has been working on. If you’ll remember, several months back we wrote about Michael Booth’s hiring of new folks for a new game for a small team, similar to the size of Hearthstone. Michael Booth came to Blizzard from Valve and was the lead designer for Left 4 Dead and also the lead designer for porting Valve’s Counterstrike to the Xbox.

It’s safe to say the current speculation is that Blizzard is possibly working on some kind of military style FPS game. Some people are hoping for the resurrection of StarCraft: Ghost but based on the job descriptions it’s probably something more competitive in nature and I’d be willing to bet has eSports in mind. The term Overwatch is a military term itself and according to wikipedia “overwatch is the state of one small unit or military vehicle supporting another unit, while they are executing fire and movement tactics.”

The idea behind this game could be set in the StarCraft universe (after all, Heart of the Swarm launched a new 2v2 map called Overwatch) and could be a very quick PvP style of FPS game based around small units working together toward some kind of goal or objective. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar to Valve’s Team Fortress 2, especially with Blizzard’s recent fascination with free to play titles with micro-transactions.

Of additional note that could add some legitimacy to this, Blizzard campus has seemed to be on “press lockdown” which makes me wonder if they’re about to release something new and big. Their recent Warlords of Draenor press event and their Hearthstone iPad release press event have been held in San Francisco instead of on the Irvine campus like in years past. They’ve been shuffling their teams a lot since the break down of Titan last year and they’re trying to be more scrappy as evidenced by their Hearthstone development that I wouldn’t be surprised that there are things going on in the headquarters they don’t want to chance outsiders to accidentally catch a glimpse of.

I’m curious to what you think. Is this a hoax similar to The Dark Below and Corgi’s Unleashed or is this potentially Blizzard’s next big title? Let us know in the comments with your opinions!