After all the speculation, Blizzard finally announced that Overwatch will have a Chinese New Year event, beginning Tuesday, Jan. 24th.
This will give Overwatch an opportunity to make up for what some saw as a poor legendary skin for Mei during the Winter Wonderland event, and it will assuredly increase player engagement, as these events are wont to do.
But, one thing this announcement surely did was put the final nail in the coffin on any conceivable Valentine's Day event.
Now, Jeff Kaplan, himself, stated in no uncertain terms that Valentine's Day (and Easter, for that matter) would not be getting a holiday event. However, everyone seemed to forget about that when new dialogue lines leaked that showed Genji and Hanzo talking about chocolates and Genji's relationship with Mercy, which is a whole other can of worms.
This led many people to suspect (and many websites to report) that there would, in fact, be a Valentine's Day event, given the emphasis on both candy and romance, and even some who knew of Kaplan's denial assumed it was misdirection.
The announcement of a Chinese New Year event put that issue to bed. Why? It's been reported that the Chinese New Year event will have the same scope of previous events, which all ran for three weeks on the dot. With the Chinese New Year event starting on Jan. 24, it conceivably wouldn't end until – you guessed it – Feb. 14, Valentine's Day.
Overwatch has never ran two events back to back, for one, and they always start the in-game event at least a few days before the real-life event and end it some time after. The Winter Wonderland event started almost two weeks before Christmas, Halloween Terror started 20 days before Halloween and the Summer Games event started three days before the Summer Olympics. This strategy makes sense. They want to cash in on the event before it happens and cash in on the after glow of the actual event.
So, the only two ways there could still be a Valentine's Day Event would be if they ran the Chinese New Year event short, which would cause way too much controversy, or if we were playing a Valentine's Day event into the first week of March, which would feel rather stale at that point.
It looks like love won't be in the air in Overwatch, at least not with candy and flowers.
