Overwatch devs discuss why the game is coming to Switch, explain the lack of cross-progression

After years of speculation, Overwatch was finally confirmed for Switch this week. Its something fans have wanted for years now, and apparently, the dev team wanted it as well! In an interview with Eurogamer, principal game producer Wes Yanagi and lead game producer Matthew Hawley explain why they're finally bringing the game over.

Hawley: I'm super excited we're on the Nintendo Switch platform, it brings a whole new way to play Overwatch. The gyroscopic aiming alone and being able to play on the couch internally has been a lot of fun, and I'm really excited for other people to get that opportunity as well.

Yanagi: I think for us it was a real eye-opening experience when we had our first play test in the play test lab, and people were actually facing each other and having a good time and making eye contact after you got revenge on a kill from somebody else!

One sour point for fans so far has been the lack of cross-play and cross-progression. Hawley talked a bit more about why that is.

Hawley: Cross play and cross progression are something we've learned a lot about in the last couple of years, particularly looking at our other game Hearthstone, which has multiplatform support. We don't have anything specific to talk about today, other than say there are business and technical challenges to getting all that to work correctly. Our focus really has been just trying to get Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch so we can have all new ways to play and welcome the Nintendo community into the Overwatch community.

Yeah, I mean this is something we've talked about, the industry's been evolving on this in the last couple of years and we've been actively monitoring and paying attention to what's been going on, we're just not in a place yet from a technical or a business side that we can make any sort of commitment on that front.