Blizzard is not a separate company with just a publishing contract like Bungie did. Blizzard was bought out by Activision and is now Activision-Blizzard and treated as a subsidiary company.
I suppose Blizzard could try to raise enough capital to buy themselves but I think its unlikely
I remember Jeff Kaplin saying in an interview they had to go to activision and get the go ahead to make Overwatch and it been nerve wrecking. iirc this was after the mmo had been cancelled internally and the team had given them selfs 3 weeks or so to come up with something or move onto other things.
I’ll see if I can dig it out.
EDIT: I would swore I saw the info in video interview with in, but in the brief time searching I couldn't find it (Though I haven't had any coffee yet, so i'm not on my game just yet) but I did find an text interview[0] / - Under "Selling Overwatch to the Execs"
> It was an easy sell to Blizzard, but pitching it to Activision left the team nervous. After all, they were about to tell the makers of Call of Duty that they had a great idea for a brand new game: a shooter! (Something Kaplan says he only thought about after the fact.) Kaplan ran through the slides of Team 4’s Overwatch presentation to a silent audience, until Activision CEO Bobby Kotick stopped him and asked him to go back three slides.
> “I’m thinking ‘Oh no, what was back three slides?'” Kaplan said.
> It turned out to be the original hero lineup, which will look familiar to any Overwatch fan: a row of heroes on a white background. The heroes don’t look quite the same as they do today, but the style is already Overwatch. “This is going to be an amazing universe,” Kotick said, and the rest is history.
I mean Activision ovb didn't kick up much of a fuss as you know we actually have Overwatch :-P but it was just a point that Blizz's first new IP in years still had to go past the CEO of Activision before getting the green light to go into full dev.
I suppose Blizzard could try to raise enough capital to buy themselves but I think its unlikely