Marvel Rivals made Blizzard ask 'what if we could just drop 30 new heroes into Overwatch?' and inspired its biggest update ever

"Marvel Rivals definitely had an impact on us in a lot of different ways," Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller said during a panel at the 2026 Game Developers Conference on Friday. While Keller didn't mention the popular Overwatch 2 competitor while talking about Blizzard's efforts to revitalize its multiplayer shooter, a fan brought it up in the Q&A at the end of the panel. And he gamely tackled the question.

"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," Keller said. "It got us talking about, hey, what if we could just drop 30 new heroes into Overwatch? What would the player reaction to that be? Because it almost felt like the release of that game was something like that."

Blizzard didn't go quite that far, but Keller implied that NetEase's competing shooter influenced its decision to add five new characters to Overwatch at once in the latest season: Domina, Anran, Emre, Mizuki, and most importantly, Jetpack Cat.

Compared to most live service games, Marvel Rivals' launch roster and subsequent update cadence have been intense—it has 47 characters as of this writing, just three shy of Overwatch 2. Blizzard's had a decade to hit that number; Marvel Rivals didn't release until late 2024.

Overwatch's revitalization effort has been going well. The new season, which also saw the '2' leave the game's title, saw player counts rise for two consecutive weeks, rather than peaking quickly and then dropping, something Blizzard says hasn't happened since the Overwatch 2 launch in 2022.

Another five new Overwatch characters are coming before the end of the year.