Its why guide websites exist (because blizzard encourages users to share their own knowledge) but using their art and trademarks to make your own unlicensed product based on their products a no-no. I am just sad to see a project like this, full of fans, full of imagination and hard work, with the only purpose of entertaining other fans, being shut down without an answer from Blizzard :(īlizzard has clear guidelines for what is and isn't allowed. On the contrary, it was full of fan art, articles, and some creative and hilarious ideas, like an interview with bastion or conversations with fed-up support characters. Why aren’t we allowed to keep doing this fan work? Maybe blizzard is chasing Overwatch porn, but the magazine had no porn on it or in it, the cover was a parody of Playboy and there were no nudes or explicit content inside.

There are thousand of artists, websites, twitter account, youtubers… using Overwatch heroes in their channels, even making money with them. They even had to remove the Twitter cover picture because it showed two Overwatch heroes (fan art created by one of the collaborators). The copyright company asked the Playwatch team to close the website and delete all the tweets and posts related to the Magazine. We weren’t harming anyone with the project, on the contrary, we were writing articles and drawing fan art for other Overwatch fans to enjoy them. I am still trying to figure out the reason for the shutdown. The Playwatch team wrote to Blizzard, but they haven’t responded yet. From the first issue until the last one, many collaborators, including me, were able to join the team to bring Overwatch fans a new way of enjoying the game and creating a place where artists and writers could share their work with the rest of the community. A few days ago, the Playwatch creators received a notification from a digital copyright protection agency that claims Playwatch Magazine infringes Blizzard’s intellectual property rights for using Overwatch Heroes.įor a period of three months I had the pleasure of collaborating on the magazine that spread quickly and attracted hundreds of thousand of readers in just a couple of weeks.

Playwatch magizine