Overwatch heroes won't be removed anytime soon unlike we've seen in other Blizzard games

Blizzard in the past have retired old content from their games. Maybe this is because of a new update, or a conflict with an upcoming expansion. Overwatch is a vibrant game with a diverse set of characters, however, we don't exactly have hundreds of cards to deal with like Hearthstone for example, or the large amount of PvE content that World of Warcraft has. This kind of idea of removing content from Overwatch wasn't brought up until a recent interview with Game Informer was published. Luckily, it isn't going to be happening according to Jeff Kaplan. But why was this even brought up?

"We don't have any plans to retire any heroes. The interviewer asked if there was a possibility that this could ever happen and I 'left the door open'. We're not even remotely thinking about retiring heroes right now or anytime in the foreseeable future." Jeff Kaplan said on the Blizzard forums.

This was brought up because of the fact that Blizzard has actually done this before, and a few examples will be listed below. Older content has been removed previously in Blizzard games for different reasons, although a lot of the time, it's been because of some sort of balancing issue or a change that requires certain content to be retired. So, what examples are there?

- The introduction of Standard mode in Hearthstone ended up getting rid of two previous expansions and their respective card sets, "Goblins vs Gnomes" and "Curse of Naxxramas". The way standard mode works also means that as time goes on and new expansions roll in, older Hearthstone expansions will be sent off from standard.

- Warlords of Draenor removed quite a bit of content from World of Warcraft, including some item upgrades, certain scenarios, guild perks and levelling, and even some areas.

- When Starcraft released the "Heart of the Swarm" expansion, for the sake of balance Blizzard stopped Protoss players from being able to deploy Motherships and Carriers. Other units too, such as the Zerg Overseer for example.

- Mounts within World of Warcraft have been retired too, although mostly for the appeal of getting them whilst you still can and having a rare mount rather than it being a balance issue (Summer Games content in Overwatch for example). Some of these mounts include the Brewfest Ram and the Winter Wolf.

Luckily though, as mentioned at the start of this, Blizzard wont be removing or retiring any of our beloved Overwatch heroes, so you can rest easy knowing that Grandpa Reinhardt isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Well, apart from when he charges into the enemy team, but that's another story. So we shouldn't have anything to worry about!