It’s not unfair to say that Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 was struggling before its recent rebrand back to just Overwatch. Now, Blizzard’s iconic hero shooter is planning bigger updates than ever before with more heroes, maps, and events than ever before, and it’s all due to NetEase’s Marvel Rivals.
Marvel Rivals and Overwatch player counts are now trading blows with player counts following the rebrand of Blizzard’s game as the two current titans of the hero shooter genre. As Rivals jumps to make its biggest year ever, with Black Cat’s addition seemingly just around the corner, Overwatch game director Aaron Keller admits that the game has lit a fire under the team
“Marvel Rivals definitely had an impact on us in a lot of different ways,” the game director said at a Game Developers Conference 2026 panel last week, via PC Gamer.
“I think one of the biggest ones was seeing the amount of excitement that new players to Rivals had for this big drop of heroes,” he continued, pointing to the hero shooter’s frequent addition of new characters every season. “It for us talking about, ‘hey, what if we could just drop 30 new heroes into Overwatch? What would the player reaction to that be?’”
On launch, Marvel Rivals had a colossal 33 playable characters, a number which has now grown to a massive 47 characters. Keller explained that “it almost felt like the release of that game” was similar to someone lobbing an Avengers movie’s worth of characters into a single update, and that was the main inspiration behind the latest Overwatch rebrand.
Of course, Blizzard’s actual rebrand launch was smaller than chucking a few dozen characters into the game, but the addition of five new characters already made for Overwatch’s biggest update of all time. Additionally, the team is still working on continued updates for the game that aim to match the cadence and excitement of Marvel Rivals.
As anyone should tell you, this is why competition is so important. Bungie’s Marathon added proximity chat because players wanted it after Arc Raiders, PlayStation 3 added trophies after Xbox 360 added achievements. Now, Overwatch’s updates are bigger and more exciting due to the sheer scale and hype of Marvel Rivals.
As Blizzard continues to create bigger and better updates for the game, Keller is also keen to note that they will not be doing so with AI. While the game director admits there may be a place for AI somewhere, the team will not be making characters with generative AI for the foreseeable future.
“We don’t want to put AI-generated content out in front of players,” Keller said in a prior interview. “That’s just not something that we’re comfortable doing. We want this to feel like a handcrafted universe, and it is a handcrafted universe.”
Right now, both Overwatch and Marvel Rivals are available as free-to-play games on PC and console.
