Blizzard has recently announced a collaboration with Hasbro. The Nerf Rival toy line is set to be expanded in 2019 with Overwatch-themed blasters.
Blizzard has achieved great success with Overwatch and is also exploiting the brand through merchandise. What has been missing so far are the weapons of the heroes. Therefore, Hasbro will take care of this starting in 2019 by adding Overwatch-themed blasters to its “Nerf Rival” product line.
Will the weapons of Tracer, Reaper, and others come?
What is Nerf Rivals? The Rival products from Nerf are considered “high-performance toy weapons.” With this, Hasbro aims to provide an alternative to paintball for teenagers. Instead of hard paintballs, Rival uses foam balls. Traditionally, players are divided into the teams Red and Blue, which is also reflected in the weapons.
Will there be replicas of the Overwatch weapons? How the collaboration between Blizzard and Hasbro will look like is still unknown. It is also unclear whether there will be detailed replicas of the weapons from the game or whether the Nerf weapons will just be in the colors of the respective heroes.
Hasbro has recently released some weapons themed around Deadpool. However, these were blasters from the normal Rival assortment that were just specially printed.
A joy for cosplayers? Nerf guns have been used by cosplayers for quite some time. With a lot of patience, fans take apart the toy guns, paint them, and assemble them according to their wishes.
It is still unclear how the deal between Blizzard and Hasbro will actually look. However, if the weapons are indeed replicas from the game, it would surely make the target audience of crafters and cosplayers very happy.
