If I alt+f4 or right click and close on the taskbar icon, or even if I esc and click on quit to desktop, the game never properly closes. The Overwatch application remains open in the background. I can see it when I expand battle.net in task manager. The only way to actually close it is to kill the process in task manager.
Until I do that, I can’t open Overwatch again because it’s actually still there silently in the background.
This is a problem with the permissions on your Windows user account.
My windows account is Administrator.
That might be true, but every user account, even administrator, can become corrupted after a Windows update or other software interfering. Please follow the troubleshooting steps I linked for you above.
You’re suggesting that this is a permission issue, and I’m assuming you mean that Battle.net is failing to read process information to see if overwatch is running or not.
This is not the case, Overwatch turns into a zombie process and doesn’t terminate properly. This happened after the developers added all the checks for leaver penalties. It’s not a permission issue.
The staff investigated the issue several years ago and found it was related to permissions on the Windows user — which is why it becomes a zombie. Creating a new admin account resolves the problem for most people who post about it. Whether someone wants to perform the troubleshooting is up to them, but spreading misinformation won’t help people facing this.
You’re not reading his problem. The post you linked says the launcher incorrectly detects a running game. What this post says is that he closes the game but it still runs in the background. The Battle.net launcher correctly reads that the game is still running and does not close gracefully, hence needing to be killed via task manager.
There is nothing regarding permission issues here. And if it was a “permission issue” then it would be easy to fix it by editing permissions.
If it was due to “corruption” as you said then running “sfc /scannow” would fix it as if checks system files and replaces anything that has the wrong file hash
I will try and then come back to update.
I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding, let’s be nice. 
I’m frustrated to… (And sadly it got worse after the mid season patch, even my temporary fixes are not working.)
I reported this issue first in 2023 November, then the second time in 2024 June with more details. It’s still a problem, even after a Windows reinstall. I only saw it two times in the past days, when it closed normally, and Battle.net is not even running for me. It’s set to exit after a game launch.
The game closes after some time, but it takes 2-3 minutes.
I investigated this a bit. My laptop has an Nvidia GPU with Ryzen CPU, so I can switch between the integrated AMD and dedicated Nvidia GPU. I found this issue only happens with AMD. If I use Nvidia, I can see it disappears from task manager within about 10-15 seconds of exiting the game, but with AMD it takes a few minutes. I also have a desktop with an AMD graphics card and it takes a few minutes to close.
It could be that during exit, Overwatch is calling some shutdown procedure in the graphics drivers, and something within the AMD drivers is taking much longer than it should. Just a guess though.
And in my experience it doesn’t happen when you use a GCN card, like the RX580, but happens with RDNA like the RX5700XT or RX6900XT. (Reported to AMD ofc.)
Don’t know who’s fault, but a fix would be good.
can confirm, i am still using an rx580.
don’t have this issue
Agreed. Most people who have this issue are still having it.
Sorry, forgot to update. I tried this. I made a new account and gave it admin, and the same thing happened. When closing Overwatch in any way, it gets stuck and I have to use task manager to kill the process.
Also on either account, when I close Overwatch, many times when it gets stuck the resources Overwatch uses suddenly shoots up, my fans go to max, and when I look at task manager it says memory usage is like 90% when usually it’s like 20%. Not sure what this is about.
This has been happening before I upgraded my PC and after.
Before I upgraded my PC (a couple months ago), I had W10 (same as now), and an Nvidia gpu. I had the exact same problem as now.
When I upgraded, I swapped to an AMD gpu, I upgraded my ram, gpu, cpu, motherboard, psu… literally everything, and I freshly installed Windows 10 on a new storage device.
Same problem.
I’m not sure what’s causing it.
This is definitely a memory leak of some sort. As a temporary fix I suggest making a batch script to kill Overwatch forcefully:
Hi Nicole,
I don’t think there’s any misinformation, it just seems this is different from the original ‘permissions’ issue you linked to. There’s now enough information here from multiple users for further investigation. Would you be able to send this to the team to try again?
Here are the steps:
Thank you!
switched to a 5600xt and have this issue now
And sometimes the issue is so random, I played / started Overwatch four times, and it closed properly three times.
agreed, same issue,
99% of the time it does not close properly
The next time this happens you can create a dump file in the task manager which may help Blizz find the issue: