"We typically don't try to balance the game differently per region," Aaron Keller said at a press conference at BEXCO, on the second and final day of Overwatch Day, the fan festival staged by Nexon.
Regional data, platform data and community sentiment all feed the process, Keller said, with the team meeting multiple times a week to weigh them.
"One of the regions that we always specifically do a deeper dive on is Korea, because there are differences in the way Koreans play," he said.
"Some of the heroes are more popular in Korea than they are in the rest of the world, and some of the heroes even have different win rates in Korea than they do in the rest of the world."
Korean habits have redrawn the global game before, most famously with GOATS, the Korean-born composition that dominated for about a year and prodded Blizzard into introducing role queue.
Keller put the gap down to temperament. "In Korea specifically, there's a very competitive mindset for playing Overwatch, and a lot of players take getting better and practicing at the game very seriously," he said.
Nexon took over Overwatch's Korean PC service on Aug. 12, the first time a domestic publisher has run the community, a day after D.Mon joined the roster as its 53rd hero.
Walter Kong, Blizzard's senior vice president and head of development for live games and mobile, said the groundwork was laid as far back as 2022, as Overwatch settled into its live-service era.
"Korea really was an opportunity we were very excited about, given the way that Korean players had supported Overwatch very strongly and passionately," Kong said, describing a wide-open strategy review that eventually narrowed to partnership.
Nexon scored high against Blizzard's checklist, he said, citing live-service operating experience, genre expertise and familiarity with the market and its players.
The switch has not been frictionless, with players who link their Battle.net accounts to Nexon finding it harder to queue with friends overseas, a trade-off raised repeatedly at the session.
"When we started this, we looked very closely and thought a lot about how that change would affect people," Kong said, adding that match quality had held up and that Blizzard would continue to monitor it.
Ben Bell, executive producer and senior vice president for Overwatch, cast the deal as a bid for proximity. "The whole goal of this partnership is to get closer to our fans," he said.
Nexon's reach among Korean PC players, Bell said, gives Blizzard "an opportunity to listen more closely and understand what is gonna make the game better for players here in this region."
Kong called the Busan visit "a bit like a homecoming," recalling the Overwatch Festival held in the city before the game launched in 2016. Korean players, he said, "have become really part of the building of Overwatch's history along with us."
Bell, on his first visit to Busan, said meeting fans at a signing session had been the highlight, calling it "real special" to hear personal stories about why people play.
"When they opened the doors to this event yesterday, the fans just came streaming in, and they didn't stop coming," Keller said.
"There's a reason why the two professional gamers in the Overwatch universe, D.Va and D.Mon, are from Korea," he said, calling the country the imagined epicenter of competitive gaming culture.
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