You could say Blizzard’s Overwatch took the world by storm, reaching 25 million players and generating over $1 billion in revenue since its launch last May. Its explosive popularity has spawned collectible figurines, nendoroids and Pop! Vinyls, and earned it the title of PC’s highest grossing game of 2016. Overwatch is also known for its seasonal events, which are typically available for a restricted period of time to players. But according to Director Jeff Kaplan’s recent comments, that could change very soon:
“For Uprising, we had two stretch goals: One was to allow “All Heroes” to play the event. It might not seem hard but there were a lot of edge case/bug fixes for us to handle. The other goal was to put Uprising into Custom Game during the event. There were enough challenges technically with doing this that we ended up not achieving this goal. We might someday make Seasonal Events available when the events are not running, but for now, it’s not a priority due to the technical challenge. We also do like keeping the events rare and special”
The comments, which come in the middle of the current ‘Uprising event’ (April 11 – May 1), reveal that there were already plans brewing to make limited-time events have a more permanent role. Kaplan has previously suggested Overwatch may be getting a map editor, and hasn’t ruled out a Nintendo Switch version of the game either. Overwatch lead writer Michael Chu also promised fans there would be more story-related content and updates releasing in 2017.
