Kaya Oldaker (Commissions open) · @Kayas_Kosmos
16th Oct 2019 from TwitLonger
"Overwatch - Lost Light" and Blizzard Boycott.
From today onward, I will no longer be working on “Overwatch - Lost Light”. I really wanted to power through with it in spite of what Blizzard has been doing recently regarding Blitzchung, but I have completely lost the motivation now. Over the last several months I have been steadily losing interest in completing the comic due to work overload and repeated burnout as well as Blizzard’s glacial pace of adding lore to Overwatch, which has slowly been turning me away from it.
Really the Blitzchung situation is the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. Lost Light was originally created for multiple reasons. The first and most important one was to produce a portfolio piece that could help me get hired for comic projects, as well as help me hone my comic creating skills and push my work to a higher standard. After doing 13 pages, the comic has fulfilled these two purposes. The second reason was a frustration over a lack of lore and a desire to “fill in the gaps”. And lastly, I wanted to tell a touching story about being kind in a cruel world.
But let’s be real here. It’s clear that Blizzard no longer cares about its stories, or even cares about its original player base. It cares only about money now no matter what the cost, just like every other large corporation under the system of late-stage neoliberal capitalism. Blizzard would much rather trample on the rights of the people of Hong Kong rather than stick to its own values.
To those who are fans of the comic, I cannot tell you how sorry I am as I know many of you were getting excited to see where the story was going. However, I have some good news for fans of Humphrey. Humphrey is a character who I have grown a strong emotional attachment to and just because Blizzard messed up doesn’t mean that he should go down with them. He deserves better than that. Therefore, I am bringing him over to my original IP, “The Increasingly Absurd Endeavours of Gretchen Goosander”. I will have to heavily alter his story and he may undergo minor character design changes in order to match the Gretchen Goosander style better, but otherwise it’s the same Humphrey we know and love.
This is a project that I have been working on since 2013 (that has been stuck in development hell) and I feel that it is time to start finishing up the project now. I’m really not concerned with trying to get into the art industry anymore, I just want to create the things that I want to create again. Furthermore, the Gretchen Goosander series is something I intend to make a public domain property, which means all of you can use whichever characters you want for whatever purpose, including Humphrey. I will be making sure to notify any followers of Lost Light when I intend to start launching material for the Gretchen Goosander series.
I will continue to see what the lore of the game does and of course I will continue to follow my favourite Overwatch content creators, but I will never support Blizzard financially.
Once more, I am very sorry about cancelling the comic, but I hope you can all understand the decision I have come to. Thank you all for your support.