Blizzard has filed a trademark and begun hiring for an unannounced project called Overwatch.
Overwatch's trademark was issued yesterday by the United States Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) and ticks all of the usual gaming and game-related boxes.
The company's recruiting page also makes reference to an unannounced project which is likely related. While Blizzard has traditionally focused large teams of developers on its core franchises, this seems to be changing with Hearthstone production director Jason Chayes commenting in a Gamasutra interview published yesterday that:
“We started up a new development team because we kind of recognised that we needed to have this ability to be more experimental, experiment with different types of games than what we were doing with our big, core franchises."
The title Overwatch has a military ring to it, and Left4Dead developer Turtle Rock's CEO Mike Booth joined Blizzard last year to work on a similar project. Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson also announced early in 2013 that he is working on a new project.
Blizzard is also developing an MMO named TItan which has been delayed until at least 2016.
