At Blizzcon last year, Blizzard officially announced its first brand new IP in years, Overwatch, a team based first person shooter title. However, it was later discovered that another company owned the trademark to Overwatch and in a worst-case scenario, Blizzard may have had to rename the game it just announced. Now here we are a year later and the studio has actually managed to secure the trademark.
After some legal back and forths, Blizzard has obtained the Overwatch trademark from a company called Innovis Labs. This company filed the trademark in 2013 for multiple applications, one of which was video games.
We don't know the terms of the deal but it does seem that Blizzard financially settled the issue. All of the details we have surrounding the case were outlined in a blog post from attorney, Sephen McArthur. This is all well timed too, with Blizzcon 2015 set to take place this week along with the Overwatch beta having just launched.
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KitGuru Says: It would seem that Blizzard has managed to squash any legal issues in the way of Overwatch, though from the outside it didn't seem like the studio was ever worried to begin with. Have any of you got in to the Overwatch beta yet? What do you think of it? I'm still waiting on an invite myself.
Nope. No Beta here. Not sure if it was run in Europe?