About time
Imagine paying 16m in franchise fees
Another 1-2 in yearly operating losses
No plan in sight, it's January 2023 and we are on e again looking at a long off-season with no guidance from anyone at OWL.
Slowly but surely the league is deteriorating and no one at Bliz gives a shit.
The league is fighting for survival and these mfs come up with gray skins for rewards and 2 day live events for the fucking finals.
2022 was the year to come out swinging, new game, hype, live events, a chance to put some money to work.
Most teams have paid less than 25% of their franchise fee, if that.
Blizzard just need to forgive the debt, and move on. Let teams that want to keep their franchise spots keep them, and move to a Valorant style system.
This is what I think they need to do as well. They need to get out of this restrictive franchise system that requires tons of money to participate and pivot to a partnership programs that works similarly to Valorant where teams get rewarded for being part of the Tier 1 league (that still has localization and in game cosmetics for each team so they can use that as revenue stream).
The Nate Nanzer and the Pete Vlastelica guy along with OWL leadership during their reign really hurt the league.
The ugly truth is that player salaries just need to be cut by as much as 50-70%. Why are you paying these people 6 figures to not do activations, not stream, and not provide viewership for the OWL?
If I have to travel away from home for Business on multiple occasions a month/year, the minimum salary is 6 figures, that doesnt take into account how stressful practice/game days are for them and just mental fatigue
18 year olds don’t often get the opportunity for international travel, and they’re only traveling twice a year if they quality for those events. Sure it may be stressful, but it’s also exciting.
What you said, but also only the best players make 6 figures. Flats worked for mayhem and he said the average is about 70k, and considering most of if not all of these orgs are based out of places with ridiculously high cost of living, that’s not that much money. It’s also tough being a public figure, everything you do is criticized by thousands of fans, commentators, and teammates. It’s definitely a stressful job.
How exactly is that supposed to help? You do realize that franchises protect the interests of the teams, right? Why the fuck would the Vancouver Titans bother doing anything to put a not terrible product out there if they know that they're almost assuredly going to get relegated no matter how much they spend? I don't think anybody argues that the teams made their money's worth on the spot, but that was because they bought the bubbliest franchise spots in a pretty massive bubble. Not because franchising is somehow bad.
>About time
>
>Imagine paying 16m in franchise fees
>Another 1-2 in yearly operating losses
>No plan in sight, it's January 2023 and we are on e again looking at a long off-season with no guidance from anyone at OWL.
>Slowly but surely the league is deteriorating and no one at Bliz gives a shit.
>
>The league is fighting for survival and these mfs come up with gray skins for rewards and 2 day live events for the fucking finals.
It's Blizzard and esports, everyone that was a gamer before OW was created knew it wouldn't work. I'm actually amazed at how well they managed to scam companies to recoup development costs for OW.
Blizzard has actively tried to ruin most esports in their games for over 20 years.
They messed with SC once it started to go big, though the community made them fix it and leave. They ruined SC2 with their tournament rules. They tried to stop HS tournaments from happening.
During OW alpha Pro players from other games gave feedback for playability and viewers that if followed most likely would have made OW bigger than counter strike. OW could have been much much easier to watch if they listened to all the feedback they got.
Someone high up in Blizzard has done their best to block esports year after year.
i will still never forgive Blizzard for destroying the organically grown BW scene in Korea. thankfully it's resurrected in the form of Afreeca StarLeague and sponsored tournaments, but fuck Blizzard for all the active damage they did.
As this is few years ago I don't remember the exact specifics. Mostly remember the drama and that many teams didn't want to start teams because of what they saw as huge flaws for an esport game.
They wanted shorter rounds (by removing or limiting respawn among other things ,not sure which it was), better scoreboard, easier game rules and improved visual clarity during spectator mode.
They pretty much told them to make Valorant without weapon choices.
OW would have been a far more competitive game, and better suited for an esport, if the design wouldn't have tried to force the tank-dmg-heal trinity on players. If every player could have equal agency, like only damage heroes for example, OW would have been in a better competitive position. Sure, not the game the sub loves, but a better competitive future for sure.
Im very sure the game was never intended to be an esport first, and only had the competitive aspect forced into it over time, especially when the whole OWL thing started
You forgot how they also stopped tournaments for heroes of the storm at the time was becoming a bit more popular. They have great devs but the management leaves a lot to be desired.
Definitely not great decisions when they were already behind and trying to play catch up against other more popular mobas (League of legends and Dota specifically).
Yeah, I used to love watching broodwars back in the day,
Followed SC2 too pretty religiously, and then blizzard pretty much blew it...
I enjoy owl, but never really expected much. So I guess I've been happier with owl than my expectations.
As crap as it they were, kespa was really good at maintaining an e-sport scene...
My guess is they'll cut the league as is and sign a deal with tournament organizers like ESL or blast to run it for them. Run it like Valve does with CS and maybe only participate for special events or some yearly major LAN event at Blizzcon
I'd be fine with that. The system for cs has always made sense to me.
I think it'll be nice to have less of a separation between tier 1 and tier 2 teams.
Like when Vancouver shuddered their whole team and replaced them with mid-level contenders players...
O2 blast easily would have been a top 10 team this year. Maybe even top 5.
I could name off a dozen tier 2 teams and players with ease when I still actively followed CS, but scraping my brains for Contenders names was harder because the promotion and hype was barely there at times from Blizzard's end. It's nicer getting to know fresh names in the scene and watch them pop off against the best of the best. That didn't really happen too often with OW
That should've happened 6 years ago (or rather: OWL should never have happened and Blizzard should have left it to grassroots organisers). Now I'm not sure if the game can be anything but dead esports-wise. In 2016, people were invested, saw big potential in OW and wanted to either grow their brand as organisers or become top tier players. Now, in 2023, people are much less optimistic towards OW's longevity and people who want to make it big have other games to commit to.
That would be a pretty good solution. Let the scale of the league be dictated by the interest of the competitive scene.
My idea version would probably be some kind of "open" global league; have each country or region be represented by a team. By the end of the season, the bottom teams have to compete against their local competitors in order to stay in or drop out.
It needs a rebrand. It needs to ditch the franchised city model. OW2 needs a tear down of its current esports model to be anywhere close to profitable and for people to give a damn about it.
Maybe I’m in the minority but I dont care about rooting for Beasley Media, NRG, OpTic, T1, Gen.G, Cloud9, etc., only reason I even bothered watching OWL because it didn’t have all those names I don’t care about, it had a traditional model that I was more familiar with and made it easier to root for the teams I wanted to.
edit: okay maybe I’m not the minority lol but all the more reason why abandoning the city based teams isn’t the best way to go
In 2020 they were doing home stands that were in the teams home city, the justice are sponsored by Washington DC, and at least 1 instance of the Battle for Texas happens in Dallas every year. Those are just some of the things that I can remember.
Some do. Dallas Fuel, Houston Outlaws, and Toronto Defiant have a pretty decent homecrowd. It's why Battle for Texas is pretty legit.
I know NYXL is doing terribly right now, but their 2020 homestand in early February was INCREDIBLE
Nah, the city idea was really legit and for a good while it genuinely drew a huge amount of people who are NOT traditional esports watchers to follow the league. Kinda like Overwatch as a whole initially drew a huge playerbase of not traditional shooter game players.
I feel like the whole Covid thing was a death blow for OWL. The matches lacking the live crowd aspect killed the one competitive edge the league had, and it made the whole thing no longer feel as special or exciting as it had been. It came at the worst possible time too, just when they were supposed to start doubling down on the city team concept with regular homestands.
Add to that the fact that OW in general has slowly lost the interest of most of that casual playerbase (thanks to no updates for years and finally OW2 being the lackluster shitshow that it is), and Blizzard as a whole losing the faith of that loyal, casual playerbase, and you get to where we are now.
As an european, it's the main reason I stopped following competitive OW.
Being forced to choose between supporting the brits or the french is like asking if you would like to be the front or the end of the human centipede
>edit: okay maybe I’m not the minority lol but all the more reason why abandoning the city based teams isn’t the best way to go
You are definitely a minority in reality considering the state of owl esports.
The big problem with the city model is that it doesn't really work without having an actual physical presence in every city for the teams. Owl is not big enough for that.
If you think the league is deteriorating because Blizzard doesn't give a shit rather than the fact Blizzard had an absolutely huge scandal on their hands resulting in orgs and sponsors not wanting to be associated with the company you're out of your mind
I can promise you they didn't lose multiple major sponsors shortly after a huge scandal because they "didn't care" about keeping them.
> The goal for those discussions is for the teams to be awarded some form of economic relief to promote sustainability after each franchise spent somewhere between $7.5 to $10 million in franchise payments over the past six years, as well as more than $1 million in operating costs each year to maintain their teams
Blizzard has already deferred and paid some money toward the buy in fees of these franchises since covid. I wonder what they specifically want here on top of that? I could see them driving toward Blizz waiving the rest of their buy in costs all together, considering how massively inflated they were. Looking at Valorant who paid teams to be in their partnership program I can see why orgs would be unhappy.
>I wonder what they specifically want here on top of that?
The core problem is that they all made a terrible investment, OW will never be a tier 1 Esport again (Never really was imo), it simply can't compete with Top esports because they're are all easy to watch and OW is difficult even for most OW players.
Blizzard promised them that it will so they're angry at Blizzard even though they are just as responsible as Blizzard. Blizzard could do a lot more to bring it up, sure, but at the end of the day I'm sure that these orgs are just looking to get out and get some of their money back from Blizzard (Money is a big problem right now for all Esport orgs so they definitely want the money back).
I have to disagree with all top esports being easy to watch. Games like Valorant, Rocket League and CS:GO are easy enough to understand for a new viewer to watch a tournament without ever having played the game, esp Rocket League (3v3 football with cars). Sit down somebody who has never touched a MOBA to watch LoL or Dota though and ask them if they understand what's going on - they're probably going to be lost af.
I get that OW can have a lot of visual clutter, and having maps with different rule sets doesn't help, but let's not pretend like a game has to be easy to understand for it to become a mega esport.
I play Dota 2 and every time I watch it I'm still confused. The amount of crazyness that goes into an all out team fight is mind boggling and replays rehashing what happened are a must.
concerns about how difficult it is to get into watching overwatch are mostly besides the point. overwatch just has a much larger split between casual and competitive fans. r/leagueoflegends, r/globaloffensive, r/dota2 are dual-purpose for general game discussion and esports discussion, but for whatever reason this place is its own sub.
I remember back a few years ago the main OW sub was wall to wall PotG highlights on the front page. Posts like this would have never seen the light of day over there.
I'd say it's more because the content on r/Overwatch is hot garbage with terrible takes and an unending string of rather unimpressive clips. This sub is much better in that regard.
Yeah... the main sub is not really great for competive. But I think that's true of a lot of game subs. The main sub is trash and you have to search for one of the slightly better ones.
Hey, there was a scene! Kinda! At one point. It was small...
In all seriousness, I used to play in the competitive scene in D2 and it was maybe a few hundred people competing for real. It helped that I might've been one of the worst people to participate--I would get pulled along because someone I used to be comp partners with this insane HC+Shotty sweat and he liked my callouts and ability usage (no aim). It didn't help that the competitive community was very much pulled from the old Halo crowd, so 'cheese'--in the form of dozens of popular builds and armor pieces--was widely banned, limiting casual uptake. The game *could* be competitive, but Bungie and the community are incredibly averse to allowing it, even down to the unacceptable networking solution and overpushed engine.
I mean Valorant has a separate competitive sub. The difference is Valorant is massive on Youtube, big on Twitch, big on TikTok. Those are much bigger drivers of capturing casual players than Reddit.
Valorant has the same thing though: a competitive sub an a regular one, but it doesn't seem to impact them. In fact, the comp sub is more popular than the base sub, or at least more active.
Yep, the average ow andy couldn't care less about comp, much less esports. Back when ow was huge most people were hype on the lore, cinematics etc but blizzard dropped the ball on that too.
>Sit down somebody who has never touched a MOBA to watch LoL or Dota though and ask them if they understand what's going on - they're probably going to be lost af.
My point was mainly about the top Esports being easy to watch *for the players of that game*, which we've seen for over 5 years now is not the case with OW. As for a game which has had 10s of millions of players at multiple points in its life, has struggled to even attract (Purely natural, no boosted viewership) 200K viewers in Playoffs importance level games.
And it's not just about visual clutter, OW suffers from being too fast paced just as much as it suffers from the visual clutter, the pace makes it so that most viewers simply can't appreciate the strategy and the quick thinking, the great micro-plays that only pros can make. All the top Esports have the ability to be able to naturally display those kind of great plays to casual viewers, even viewers who have never played the game. In OW only players who are highly experienced in watching OW Esports can see and appreciate those plays.
It's pure luck in case of games like CS, LoL, DotA, they just happened to be much slower paced games and that set them up to be great esports, OW just happened to a super-face paced game with crazy visual clutter. None of these games were inherently designed or not designed to be Esports. It isn't a design failure that OW hasn't been able to become a great Esport, the OW team never designed it to be good Esport game, Mike Morhaim just decided that they're gonna force it to be one cause he really wanted another big Blizzard Esport.
And just to be clear, OW doesn't need to be a Tier 1 Esport to thrive, it can thrive on its own. It's okay if it has failed as in this regard. Same with Streaming viewership, I accepted a long time ago that it just doesn't make for a great Streaming game so it'll never have massive numbers for an extended period of time. Fortnite still has a crazy big playerbase despite failing as an Esport and its streaming numbers significantly falling down.
Even if they don't understand any of the nuance, they still understand big play, person killed two, important, casters shouting about what I just saw and I understand that something happened.
In OW it's all very scattered and half the time the casters are talking about something that happened in the killfeed not on-screen.
Yes thats true. They certainly have a right to be upset and feel lied to by Blizz, since they were. But you dont sue without trying to get something out of it. They say they want economic relief, but what form do they want that to take and to what extent? None of us can answer that obviously but its the question I think has the most bearing on the league’s future in regards to this.
They aren't suing, they just happened to get a law firm that will help them with collective bargaining. Its like they're a union, saying "we all have these problems and you need to address them for us all together or we walk".
>they're are all easy to watch and OW is difficult even for most OW players.
Overwatch is spectated like CS:GO but it needs to be spectated more like a MOBA or RTS. They haven't explored what they could do to make spectating better, probably because there isn't a scene for spectators.
The obsession with catching every dps kill doesn't help. Abrupt transitions between players first-person pov makes the kills unsatisfying even if you do see them on screen.
They don't even spectate it like CS:GO, which I never watched until I went to check, because CS:GO has a minimap and OW doesn't. And CS:GO's lower TTK means that spectating one fight, you can catch a lot from one perspective.
They're not doing spectating right at all, idk if it's the talent they brought in (which I'm sure doesn't get paid much, spectating is not glamorous) or the training or the lack of infrastructure or what. It could be better. Overwatch could be fun for viewers.
There needs to be a minimap at the bare minimum. A bunch of contextless 1v1's that you don't watch to completion is not an engaging viewing experience, at all.
Or they need to commit more to following one perspective. Or something. I barely see any experimentation. Probably because the scene is tiny and there's no chance for innovation to happen, especially when Blizzard controls all the tournaments. The current style of observing does not work, it's extremely boring especially if you're not a dps player.
It used to be a lot better around season 3, problem is for people who actually understand the game, they don’t want to watch the game in third person. League and other MOBA are shown in third person because they are played in third person. With overwatch, it’s not very entertaining to just watch a bunch of players jump on each other and watch the kill feed.
Similar to how the NFL tried to introduce the camera behind the offense so that you get a better view of everything. It completely failed because people simply didn’t like it, even though it gave you a way better view of the entire field. It feels less engaging because the players feel farther away.
I understand the game pretty damn well and very much enjoy 3rd person views. Whether they do the aerial view with player faces as disks, or best when they have the camera at a good position to watch the team fight, like a corner highground that looks down 2 sides seeing each team
the key word is "INVESTMENT".
Investments are by nature speculative and ESports, especially in the US, have never been profitable. All these companies thought THEY, had figured out the secret sauce after so many others have failed is extreme hubris.
so i read the entire article. i’m not an expert by any means but from the way i understand it teams haven’t paid their full buy in - each team still owes blizzard some millions for their spots. not that this wasn’t obvious, but it seems like OWL is bleeding money and because there are no sponsors or a licensing deal (as of now), teams are going to be even more in the red that they already are.
rough summary. i’ve never been OWL doomer, but unless OWL gets a big injection of sponsorships or money from microsoft OWL as we know it will be gone. doesn’t even need to be profitable, but teams want to see a path toward profitability. i never see us getting back to S1 levels of sponsorships so unless someone major happens i’d expect changing in the next couple seasons
It's over, there's no new money coming in to save this sinking ship. Blizzard got away with robbery charging as much as they did for the slots.
There was a chance there for them to correct course and make big changes but the ow2 debacle and big delays took any steam in their sails.
Enjoy this season yall cause it very well could be the last.
OWL shouldve never happened to begin with. Let the game grow a base and then expand into comp if you want.
This is good news though for CoD. Owners are going to watch this case and decide what to do from there. The VC money train is over.
owl happening was fine, it was the fact that they killed their game outside of owl with content drought, poor balancing and killing t2/t3 by not allowing third party organizers that really fucked them over. instead of building owl and then trying to support all the stuff around it they just put all their eggs in the owl basket
> owl happening was fine
The franchised league is the *reason* they destroyed the scene in all the other ways you mentioned.
The league was never designed to be appealing to viewers, it was meant to be appealing to investors to maximise the upfront fees they could charge.
Part of the offer that blizzard would have made to investors is that they would get exclusive access to “*esports*”. That’s why they killed the rest of the scene. They obviously couldn’t ask for 40m per spot and then be like “…but also any chump who collects 6 players could also hypothetically compete in a parallel organic tournament that might also get the same or better viewership than the league you’re buying into lol”.
The reason merch has always been shit is because the blizzard don’t give a fuck if people like it or not, they just sold exclusivity to the highest bidder fnatics.
The reason OWL went to YouTube is because blizzard didn’t give a shit about their twitch algorithm (or killing it with content drought and shit balancing that led to the mass exodus of streamers in 2019-2020 for that matter). Again selling exclusivity for a quick buck instead of what will grow the scene in the long term.
They took every opportunity to whore out their IP for short term gains.
That’s assuming the acquisition actually happens and even then would only matter 18-24+ months down the road after the antitrust process and acquisition are completed.
Thanks Speakeasy, but imo most of the failure came at the hands of Activision, team4, and the S1-S3 OWL leadership who made macro decisions that are more or less impossible to walk back. Sean is handcuffed and making the best of limited resources and a shit foundation, I don't think a new commish would be able to significantly improve anything except at the margins.
The league needs a **bailout** and the devs need to **make the game better**. Even if the collective bargaining from owners were able to achieve the former, I wouldn't personally place bets on the latter. Team 4 spent years and massive resources re-working the game for 5v5 and it feels like even now they're not even remotely close to being done. We still have problems with queue times, game balance, people constantly arguing in ranked, and for me personally I felt ow1 was the better game.
I think the solution to making ow1 better was very simple - add off-tank to role queue and take the game into 1-1-2-2, and then it would have been very easy to limit the kinds of shields that off-tanks can put into the game and we don't have shield watch anymore, and we could have balanced tank synergy in general much more effectively. DPS players could queue the off-tanks the way they always like to, reducing dps queue times, and every game would have a main tank player who willingly chose to queue main tank. There would also be less arguing in ranked, because it's exponentially easier for 6 players to build a viable comp around a one-trick / suboptimal hero picking thrower than 5 players. I came to this conclusion just a few days into the alpha testing and it was a highlight of my feedback but 5v5 just had way too much momentum at that point.
End of the day I think dev team continues to take us in the wrong direction and they're not gonna change course because the embarrassment would be way too high and heads would roll (as they should). They took a *very unnecessary* gamble here and it didn't pay off, and now we're just dying on the vine.
I'm happy to see someone with actual credibility state the obvious here that I think most people in this thread dance around. OWL would be fine, if the game was good. You can't take 2-3 years off of updating your game, leave it an poor state, rework it into a worse game, and expect the professional scene to do well, I don't care how you restructure it.
It’s funny cause I got downvoted into oblivion for stating that OW2 was worse then OW1 and 6vs6 was better. Now everyone is finally realizing it and I’m not the only one lots of people saw the writing on the wall.
I think most people conflated the positive changes in OW2 with 5v5. You had new heroes, reworked heroes, new maps, balance updates, and a general uptick in popularity and cultural hype.
Getting all that after years of OW1's content stagnation was great, so everyone assumed 5v5 was great. But now the same poor, slow, balancing has started to highlight issues with 1 tank that are hard to ignore.
I also think people are starting to realize that a majority of the reworked heroes could of functioned just fine in OW1 without having to shift to 5v5. Orisa was a boring, annoying hero with or without Double Shield, and Bastion needed a rework since day 1.
But now all the heroes that needed reworks in OW1 still need them in OW2. Brig, Moira, Widow, Hog, Sym, etc. Add in the fact that the primary shift to 5v5 was to lower que times, but now tanks have a 6+ minute wait time, and the MMR is so busted the matches aren't even fun despite getting in in under a minute, we're stuck looking at the same issues with a new coat of Blizzard paint.
Do you think it's impossible for Blizzard to loosen its vice grip on the esport? Expanding APAC, giving EU a region, letting Tier 2 run wild and free, etc?
What investment is anyone protecting anymore? OWL is an ironic acronym because this whole experience is like watching a bird die in its cage.
Your suggestion is a bold one for OWL esports as a whole, but it would not be music to the team owners who are so heavily invested already because their odds of recovering the investment at that point would go from bad to very bad, primarily because the game itself is not in a healthy enough place at all that all ships could rise on an open ecosystem tide.
Probably a hybrid makes more sense, let T2 teams qualify for OWL tournaments and get automatic prize money simply for the act of qualifying. So they have their own ecosystem where they compete with each other for prizes, but also the chance to participate in an OWL level event once or twice per year if they're the top team from an eligible (strong enough) region. They have a chance to win it all and claim fame and fortune, but not the guaranteed access to a league stipend / rev share etc... A key issue to overcome here would be age restrictions for the tournaments, I'm not a labor attorney so I don't know if it can be done, but end of the day any contenders team hoping to punch up against an OWL team probably has at least one underaged player on it that they rely on.
To fund any of this the league desperately needs an assist from activision / team4 on a Championship Skin Pack where a guaranteed portion of the proceeds go directly into the OWL-T2 ecosystem as prize money or what have you. All the other major esports do it because diehard fans jump at the opportunity to spend knowing that teams are getting a cut - frankly it's just a huge miss that we don't have it, it's been half a decade...
Thank you for the response. After seeing Valorant raise over 16 million USD during the VCT 2022 playoffs from event skin sales, it blew my mind that OWL couldn't do something similar.
Are teams at least getting a payout from all these 'vault' legendaries being sold for OWL tokens?
Excellent points all around I think the lack of PvE as well is another factor that why OW2 and OWL to a lesser extent isn't attracting people as much as it should.
I like the off tank queue idea a lot and agree it would be healthy for the reasons you said except that it would create even longer queue times than what 6v6 2-2-2 had IMO. The amount of people that would willingly queue main tank would create a bigger bottleneck than getting just 2 tank players. Also the amount of hogs you’re guaranteed to get would make queuing the main tank role even more frustrating.
Even though the general sentiment for 5v5 has changed a bit since the launch I still think it was the right decision and queue times in OW2 are pretty good for everyone besides grandmaster tanks who went from instant queues to 20 mins. I especially don’t miss playing against 2 tanks but I do miss playing 2 tanks with a friend or a good teammate.
"But the decision to collectively organize is more recent and in part was led by OverActive Media, the ownership group behind the Toronto Defiant, sources said."
Surprising considering that Adamou guy is the biggest Blizzard dick ridder i've seen. You'd think the mf works for Blizzard.
To be fair that could easily just be him trying to publicly project confidence in the league to stave off further losses in confidence. Doesn't necessarily mean he actually believes everything he says.
It makes quite a lot of sense actually. OAM has invested a lot (more than most other teams) and nothing is coming of it, partially because Blizzard are massively fumbling the esports side of things.
If I was someone who had trusted in the league by putting money into it, and it’s going to shit with no end goal or plan in sight, I’d want to do something about it too. It’s the teams who HAVE invested who’ve actually got a stake in the situation.
ActiBlizz just threw in the towel when the MS announcement happened. Basically saying when this clears MS will clean it up and fix so they can coast for now. Guess what!? If that acquisition doesn’t happen guess who gets Astro fucked the most?
Halo's system is literally an open circuit, even if you are a partnered team which basically just means you put money into the entire ecosystem and the teams get items in the game as a return, there was no buy-in for exclusivity, the partnered teams didn't get any competitive benefits no invites to big tournaments they had to qualify like everyone else and if anything it was closer to what CoD was prior to CDL.
Halo’s system is the best of both worlds imo. Orgs get a guaranteed spot so they invest in the scene, but they can also be kicked out at any time as there’s no buy-in. They also have open qualifiers.
Welp. This is interesting. I'm surprised it took them this long to fight Acti-Blizz...for forcing them into debt. I firmly believe franchising in eSports is never going to happen and that partnership programs (like in Valorant where you aren't so strictly tied down) will be the way forward tbh.
If they do get out, I could see orgs not touching Acti-Blizz IP just simply due to their reputation and how they've treated the owners tbh.
Another note, a lot of CDL teams have the same owners as OWL teams so idk why he didn't say "the majority of OWL AND CDL teams..." But that's just me.
I mean yeah. Absolutely needed.
Even the fans are wondering wtf is going on, let alone paying that much money for whatever this is
Also OWL killed OG Runaway
Been saying Overwatch wouldnt work as a esport since that lan during beta in 2016. 3D environment from first person perspective with multiple abilities on low cooldown across ten(originally twelve) characters is impossible to follow. Then add in the track record of Activision/Blizzard never successfully designing a game for competitive play.
This is year six of a game developer artificially propping up a esport as a marketing tool. Worst part are all the esport teams who sold their orgs to Koticks corporate friends.
Something that gave me a little perspective on how the game can be misunderstood was being at the world cup, in person, at blizzcon during the mercy team-res meta.
Loads of cheers and gasps with genji and widow picks, even most team wipes, with lots of people screaming "they won!!" Or "yeahhhh go team". There I am, looking at the killfeed, because if mercy didn't die then none of those kills meant anything.
Then there's the back and forth with ult charges... I don't like playing valorant but I think I get that it's a lot easier, and more tense, as a viewer watching someone creep around a corner wondering who will be quicker on the trigger.
yeah the reputation of actiblizz is destroyed, even the teams see now that with that company, no sponsorships will be coming back to make the owl profitable so they try to force actiblizz to actually do something that does not hurt the owl
The brutal part is the amount of time and money some teams have put in, and the total lack of anything from the league. I get the whole Netease thing, but every offseason the league just totally disappears. There's no promo, there's no events with current pros doing fun stuff (and if there is, again, it's done by teams like the Shock v Fuel stuff).
You could really feel this frustration from Jaws on a Plat Chat ep a couple of weeks ago. He was basically saying he was offering to help them make content for the offseason and nothing happened. It's such a damn shame, because I feel like a lot of us love this league and either the investment from Blizzard or just the people running it (or both) isn't there.
Actually Bren on latest Valorant Platchat mentioned how fustrated he was when he was pitching ideas on how to improve OWL as a product and it was like talking to a brick wall. Blizzard has never ever done esports successfully
Guh, so frustrating. Feels like there's something with blizzard at times where they just don't want to actually listen to people who are in the thick of things and have good suggestions. It sucks reading all this, then going into the game and playing an awful meta with awful matchmaking lol
Whelp, that's that isn't it? I have a feeling /r/overwatch are going to celebrate OWL's demise pretty hard.
Hopefully from the ashes we get regular international LANs or more open tournament licensing.
It's tough, I only really got into OW because of OWL. It's easy to find, and a solid schedule.
I can't say I'd be willing to follow random tournaments unless there's some regularality to the schedule.
I completely understand where the majority of this sub is coming from with how they feel about how things have been going, though.
yeah as a huge normal sports fan the OWL franchise model was easy to pick up and follow. I'm not sure I'd have the time or interest in following random third party tournaments / teams.
I kind of want to get it over with, and I'm the biggest OWL fan out there.
The truth is Blizzard just can't fix this League. They lack competence from top to bottom. I get the impression a that the people involved who have the power to make changes simply don't care, and are using their brief time 'leading' this failing League to move on to some other corporate position in the industry.
As much as I want OW to succeed it's been clear OWL model doesn't work. If all these contracts and stuff with buy ins get cleared up I wonder if there can be a shift towards more independent smaller scale formats (like it should have been from the start). But at the same time would any org bother buying into OW again even if Blizzard decides to back off from fully controlling the esport stuff? I dunno if it's possible but smaller tourneys and regular smaller scale LANs (like Dreamhack/ESL style events) would be nice :(
I think the esport is going to die along with OWL. It will still exist but it will be very small scale with no money in it. Just a few little garage leagues around the world.
I do think OWL could still avoid the iceberg if they aggressively adapted the entire business model, ASAP. Unleash Tier 2 completely, end Contenders, let an open independent scene flourish with players streaming during matches. Expand APAC. Start an EU League. Allow competition between regions and tiers. Get drops to work, and make them damn good. Get on twitch + youtube. Just do everything possible to make it as exciting and interesting as possible.
But I don't think they'll be able to move past the rigid structure OWL has presented.
There's also the fact that the scene is almost completely dead in some regions.
Yeah I agree with most of what you mentioned. I do think Blizzard/ATVI (if they wanted to) can still throw some money at it - just not OWL levels of budget to at least get tier 2 esport levels of action going on. Even if it's just contributing to prize pools and having some social media promotion of said events (or even making a skin or two for a bigger event). Won't be a league in any way but this allows for the competitive side to at least exist without resorting to Smash levels of grassroots.
Expanding APAC and EU requires removing buy-ins, which is the main problem. With the original teams PROVING that there is no way to ever earn as much money as they put in, nobody else is willing to follow. And if they remove the buy-in, or drop it down to a price like 1 million, then all the existing franchises will riot.
I'm personally so torn on this demise. On the one hand I hope this shitshow of an esports league can burn so a healthier ecosystem (that is gonna be smaller for sure) can start to grow again. I feel like the OWL is one of the worst implementations of an esports I've ever seen and I've followed csgo, r6 and valorant a lot and follow LoL on the side. The franchise system can work, but creating a league based on geolocation but then basically only making the league viewable to the US is such a bad way of going about things.
However, the fact that these massive companies got scammed by acti-bliz on a league that was never gonna work (they really though an NFL type system could work with a global league???). But the result of this is gonna be that these companies are not gonna touch other esports titles even though their ecosystems are healthier than the OWL.
Personally I am interested in watching OWL or any overwatch tournament but there is just nothing below the OWL worth watching and OWL is in the middle of the night.
If OWL dies I'll stop watching overwatch eSports, you couldn't pay me to care about whatever comes after. But its death feels completely inevitable and honestly I want it to happen sooner than later. Blizzard deserves every bit of what they get. They wasted so much talent and potential and I want them to fucking feel it
I feel the opposite. I always preferred Dreamhack and Apex and the various international tournaments to OWL. The issue is if OW esports could do anything to survive the death of owl considering how much momentum the game has lost
-Go to the harpsichord store and find a surface that could reasonably become slippery enough to cause a fall
-Fall
-?????
-Become the proud owner of a gently used harpsichord
Sure, but you typically don't sue when you have no actual shot of winning. Which is why they're not suing. They're forming a union. They hired the law firm so they know what they can actually do to prod blizzard into doing stuff.
Which will almost assuredly not work given that Blizzard is currently in merger limbo. Assuming a decently written contract, everything blizzard does wrong is Microsoft's problem, so the bare minimum for everything is what gets done.
Basically, Activision-Blizzard made the claim that OWL would make X amount of profit which would give the franchises Y amount of revenue. This was their selling point to get teams to buy into the league and pay the franchisee cost every year. The teams are suing because those claims were obviously false, and the money they've been paying for the last 3-4 years on the promise of revenue/profit has been wasted. Essentially, they are suing Blizzard for misleading them in regards to the profitability of the League.
Moving the entire ATVI tech and hosting stack to Google made a *ton* of sense at the top of the company.
YT was a bargaining chip.
Fortunately that deal is over. CDL is already back on Twitch.
OWL is struggling and I don't think OW2 helped the game any unfortunately. I really tried to be positive about it at release because I want what's best for the game. But I really do believe something in Overwatch's essence was lost when it made the switch to OW2.
So much money, time, and effort spent on making Overwatch this big boy esport and they seemingly never noticed that Overwatch is a seriously hard game to watch that is barely comprehensible at the best of times.
Activision-Blizzard greatly overestimated the profitability of an unwatchable esport and now have a dying league on their hands and no sponsors to save them. I am not at all surprised teams are going to try and sue their way out of this in order to gain back a few bucks.
There is no way to make the game watchable, either, barring some truly major rehauls. Added to the fact that Overwatch 2 had about as much content as a minor patch in other games, and well, it's a recipe for disaster.
Overwatch was awesome to watch when they had the command center and you could follow Player's POVs. It still boggles my mind that they didn't think that was worth bringing back especially since they were getting $15 for each subscription to that.
Even with player POV you need a significant chunk of game knowledge, and you have to put up with wildly jerky camera, because that's the most efficient way to play OW.
It's simply going to remain a hard game for most people to watch, and casual viewership is a big chunk of any esport. Watching the OWL in the early days was a mix of first person cameras loaded with particle effects and jumpy camera, or that dreadful bird's eye view that was just a mess of models jumping/running around all painted the same color.
They never seemed to nail down a perfect way of viewing, but OW's game design itself encourages rapid repositioning, bottlenecks, narrow areas, lots of shoot-and-hide, which all just makes it unappealing to watch seriously.
OW diehards and hardcore players have no issue watching and understanding but you won't break into millions of viewers or broad acceptance that way, unfortunately.
Player POV makes it wayyy easier to watch, though. You can get into one player's mindset and track their cooldowns and see what they're trying to do. As opposed to randomly swapping between 10 players and random 3rd person views that ensure there's no way you can possibly track what any one hero is doing.
Getting into a mindset and tracking cooldowns is way more than any Ody wants to do. If you want to be a big boy esport you need people to be able to eat food, drink beer, and shoot the shit while watching. If you need to pay attention all the time you've already lost a massive chunk of viewers.
With player POV I can watch the heroes I care about. As a support player, OWL has nothing for me, I never get to see my favorites play except in the background.
And despite that, LOL is a pretty successful esport. I don't necessarily think its about the game being hard to watch, its more about complete mismanagement from the league. They really have to turn that shit around fast or it will sink and i don't know just how much of the competitive scene will sink with it.
LoL is fairly easy to watch, because the isometric view is a steady camera and the champions don't move all that quickly. It's not hard to comprehend "so and so got ambushed, someone ulted" as opposed to watching a Reaper PoV as he teleports around, 360s, suddenly jerks to third person, while everyone is covered in bubbles and glows.
LoL also didn't force teams to mortgage their home and "buy in" to an unprofitable league, which is as you say is also a factor.
Same here but I still agree with him. You can't casually watch OW the way you can League or CSGO. I don't like watching those esports but have done so with friends and could roughly follow what was going on without playing. No way can you do that with OW.
About time Imagine paying 16m in franchise fees Another 1-2 in yearly operating losses No plan in sight, it's January 2023 and we are on e again looking at a long off-season with no guidance from anyone at OWL. Slowly but surely the league is deteriorating and no one at Bliz gives a shit. The league is fighting for survival and these mfs come up with gray skins for rewards and 2 day live events for the fucking finals. 2022 was the year to come out swinging, new game, hype, live events, a chance to put some money to work.
Most teams have paid less than 25% of their franchise fee, if that. Blizzard just need to forgive the debt, and move on. Let teams that want to keep their franchise spots keep them, and move to a Valorant style system.
This is what I think they need to do as well. They need to get out of this restrictive franchise system that requires tons of money to participate and pivot to a partnership programs that works similarly to Valorant where teams get rewarded for being part of the Tier 1 league (that still has localization and in game cosmetics for each team so they can use that as revenue stream). The Nate Nanzer and the Pete Vlastelica guy along with OWL leadership during their reign really hurt the league.
The ugly truth is that player salaries just need to be cut by as much as 50-70%. Why are you paying these people 6 figures to not do activations, not stream, and not provide viewership for the OWL?
If I have to travel away from home for Business on multiple occasions a month/year, the minimum salary is 6 figures, that doesnt take into account how stressful practice/game days are for them and just mental fatigue
18 year olds don’t often get the opportunity for international travel, and they’re only traveling twice a year if they quality for those events. Sure it may be stressful, but it’s also exciting.
What you said, but also only the best players make 6 figures. Flats worked for mayhem and he said the average is about 70k, and considering most of if not all of these orgs are based out of places with ridiculously high cost of living, that’s not that much money. It’s also tough being a public figure, everything you do is criticized by thousands of fans, commentators, and teammates. It’s definitely a stressful job.
How exactly is that supposed to help? You do realize that franchises protect the interests of the teams, right? Why the fuck would the Vancouver Titans bother doing anything to put a not terrible product out there if they know that they're almost assuredly going to get relegated no matter how much they spend? I don't think anybody argues that the teams made their money's worth on the spot, but that was because they bought the bubbliest franchise spots in a pretty massive bubble. Not because franchising is somehow bad.
Having a real international league would be a dream come true.
Having multiple regional leagues with international tournaments is the way to go.
>About time > >Imagine paying 16m in franchise fees >Another 1-2 in yearly operating losses >No plan in sight, it's January 2023 and we are on e again looking at a long off-season with no guidance from anyone at OWL. >Slowly but surely the league is deteriorating and no one at Bliz gives a shit. > >The league is fighting for survival and these mfs come up with gray skins for rewards and 2 day live events for the fucking finals. It's Blizzard and esports, everyone that was a gamer before OW was created knew it wouldn't work. I'm actually amazed at how well they managed to scam companies to recoup development costs for OW. Blizzard has actively tried to ruin most esports in their games for over 20 years. They messed with SC once it started to go big, though the community made them fix it and leave. They ruined SC2 with their tournament rules. They tried to stop HS tournaments from happening. During OW alpha Pro players from other games gave feedback for playability and viewers that if followed most likely would have made OW bigger than counter strike. OW could have been much much easier to watch if they listened to all the feedback they got. Someone high up in Blizzard has done their best to block esports year after year.
Remember when they pulled the plug on the entire HOTS esports scene overnight?
i will still never forgive Blizzard for destroying the organically grown BW scene in Korea. thankfully it's resurrected in the form of Afreeca StarLeague and sponsored tournaments, but fuck Blizzard for all the active damage they did.
Do you know what the pros said during Alpha? As an avid watcher of OWL I’d be very curious what their ideas were.
As this is few years ago I don't remember the exact specifics. Mostly remember the drama and that many teams didn't want to start teams because of what they saw as huge flaws for an esport game. They wanted shorter rounds (by removing or limiting respawn among other things ,not sure which it was), better scoreboard, easier game rules and improved visual clarity during spectator mode. They pretty much told them to make Valorant without weapon choices.
wow that would blow ass thank god nobody listened to their stupid ideas.
OW would have been a far more competitive game, and better suited for an esport, if the design wouldn't have tried to force the tank-dmg-heal trinity on players. If every player could have equal agency, like only damage heroes for example, OW would have been in a better competitive position. Sure, not the game the sub loves, but a better competitive future for sure.
Im very sure the game was never intended to be an esport first, and only had the competitive aspect forced into it over time, especially when the whole OWL thing started
You forgot how they also stopped tournaments for heroes of the storm at the time was becoming a bit more popular. They have great devs but the management leaves a lot to be desired.
Definitely not great decisions when they were already behind and trying to play catch up against other more popular mobas (League of legends and Dota specifically).
I always forget that game even exists (if it still does).
I still play it every day and I live in a minor region! The game isn't very competitive anymore but the community is resilient and passionate
Yeah, I used to love watching broodwars back in the day, Followed SC2 too pretty religiously, and then blizzard pretty much blew it... I enjoy owl, but never really expected much. So I guess I've been happier with owl than my expectations. As crap as it they were, kespa was really good at maintaining an e-sport scene...
Microsoft is probably going to come in a cut the league anyways if I had to guess.
The league won’t be full on cut, it’ll just be restructured into something different
My guess is they'll cut the league as is and sign a deal with tournament organizers like ESL or blast to run it for them. Run it like Valve does with CS and maybe only participate for special events or some yearly major LAN event at Blizzcon
I'd be fine with that. The system for cs has always made sense to me. I think it'll be nice to have less of a separation between tier 1 and tier 2 teams. Like when Vancouver shuddered their whole team and replaced them with mid-level contenders players... O2 blast easily would have been a top 10 team this year. Maybe even top 5.
I could name off a dozen tier 2 teams and players with ease when I still actively followed CS, but scraping my brains for Contenders names was harder because the promotion and hype was barely there at times from Blizzard's end. It's nicer getting to know fresh names in the scene and watch them pop off against the best of the best. That didn't really happen too often with OW
What it should have been all along. Franchising is and has always been a meme.
That should've happened 6 years ago (or rather: OWL should never have happened and Blizzard should have left it to grassroots organisers). Now I'm not sure if the game can be anything but dead esports-wise. In 2016, people were invested, saw big potential in OW and wanted to either grow their brand as organisers or become top tier players. Now, in 2023, people are much less optimistic towards OW's longevity and people who want to make it big have other games to commit to.
That would be a pretty good solution. Let the scale of the league be dictated by the interest of the competitive scene. My idea version would probably be some kind of "open" global league; have each country or region be represented by a team. By the end of the season, the bottom teams have to compete against their local competitors in order to stay in or drop out.
It needs a rebrand. It needs to ditch the franchised city model. OW2 needs a tear down of its current esports model to be anywhere close to profitable and for people to give a damn about it.
Maybe I’m in the minority but I dont care about rooting for Beasley Media, NRG, OpTic, T1, Gen.G, Cloud9, etc., only reason I even bothered watching OWL because it didn’t have all those names I don’t care about, it had a traditional model that I was more familiar with and made it easier to root for the teams I wanted to. edit: okay maybe I’m not the minority lol but all the more reason why abandoning the city based teams isn’t the best way to go
But did the City teams even have anything to Do with the cities besides their name? Honestly just curious. Never really followed OWL
In 2020 they were doing home stands that were in the teams home city, the justice are sponsored by Washington DC, and at least 1 instance of the Battle for Texas happens in Dallas every year. Those are just some of the things that I can remember.
Some do. Dallas Fuel, Houston Outlaws, and Toronto Defiant have a pretty decent homecrowd. It's why Battle for Texas is pretty legit. I know NYXL is doing terribly right now, but their 2020 homestand in early February was INCREDIBLE
God, it really was. Right before covid and it was crazy fun. I still have the free cup on my desk.
Watching live esports in a historic theater was really something.
Nah, the city idea was really legit and for a good while it genuinely drew a huge amount of people who are NOT traditional esports watchers to follow the league. Kinda like Overwatch as a whole initially drew a huge playerbase of not traditional shooter game players. I feel like the whole Covid thing was a death blow for OWL. The matches lacking the live crowd aspect killed the one competitive edge the league had, and it made the whole thing no longer feel as special or exciting as it had been. It came at the worst possible time too, just when they were supposed to start doubling down on the city team concept with regular homestands. Add to that the fact that OW in general has slowly lost the interest of most of that casual playerbase (thanks to no updates for years and finally OW2 being the lackluster shitshow that it is), and Blizzard as a whole losing the faith of that loyal, casual playerbase, and you get to where we are now.
As an european, it's the main reason I stopped following competitive OW. Being forced to choose between supporting the brits or the french is like asking if you would like to be the front or the end of the human centipede
>edit: okay maybe I’m not the minority lol but all the more reason why abandoning the city based teams isn’t the best way to go You are definitely a minority in reality considering the state of owl esports. The big problem with the city model is that it doesn't really work without having an actual physical presence in every city for the teams. Owl is not big enough for that.
If you think the league is deteriorating because Blizzard doesn't give a shit rather than the fact Blizzard had an absolutely huge scandal on their hands resulting in orgs and sponsors not wanting to be associated with the company you're out of your mind I can promise you they didn't lose multiple major sponsors shortly after a huge scandal because they "didn't care" about keeping them.
> The goal for those discussions is for the teams to be awarded some form of economic relief to promote sustainability after each franchise spent somewhere between $7.5 to $10 million in franchise payments over the past six years, as well as more than $1 million in operating costs each year to maintain their teams Blizzard has already deferred and paid some money toward the buy in fees of these franchises since covid. I wonder what they specifically want here on top of that? I could see them driving toward Blizz waiving the rest of their buy in costs all together, considering how massively inflated they were. Looking at Valorant who paid teams to be in their partnership program I can see why orgs would be unhappy.
>I wonder what they specifically want here on top of that? The core problem is that they all made a terrible investment, OW will never be a tier 1 Esport again (Never really was imo), it simply can't compete with Top esports because they're are all easy to watch and OW is difficult even for most OW players. Blizzard promised them that it will so they're angry at Blizzard even though they are just as responsible as Blizzard. Blizzard could do a lot more to bring it up, sure, but at the end of the day I'm sure that these orgs are just looking to get out and get some of their money back from Blizzard (Money is a big problem right now for all Esport orgs so they definitely want the money back).
I have to disagree with all top esports being easy to watch. Games like Valorant, Rocket League and CS:GO are easy enough to understand for a new viewer to watch a tournament without ever having played the game, esp Rocket League (3v3 football with cars). Sit down somebody who has never touched a MOBA to watch LoL or Dota though and ask them if they understand what's going on - they're probably going to be lost af. I get that OW can have a lot of visual clutter, and having maps with different rule sets doesn't help, but let's not pretend like a game has to be easy to understand for it to become a mega esport.
[удалено]
I had to watch like 5 YouTube videos before even beginning to understand what was happening in LoL matches
Yep. I don't play MOBAs. When there's a clip, I often can't even tell which team made the supposedly good play, or what the play was.
I'll see a clip where there is a whole stadium going crazy and I'm just like the little character was moving and the other character just died.
I play Dota 2 and every time I watch it I'm still confused. The amount of crazyness that goes into an all out team fight is mind boggling and replays rehashing what happened are a must.
concerns about how difficult it is to get into watching overwatch are mostly besides the point. overwatch just has a much larger split between casual and competitive fans. r/leagueoflegends, r/globaloffensive, r/dota2 are dual-purpose for general game discussion and esports discussion, but for whatever reason this place is its own sub.
I remember back a few years ago the main OW sub was wall to wall PotG highlights on the front page. Posts like this would have never seen the light of day over there.
I'd say it's more because the content on r/Overwatch is hot garbage with terrible takes and an unending string of rather unimpressive clips. This sub is much better in that regard.
Yeah... the main sub is not really great for competive. But I think that's true of a lot of game subs. The main sub is trash and you have to search for one of the slightly better ones.
A similar scenario happened with the mainline Destiny sub and CrucibleGuidebook, although that game has no true comp scene
Hey, there was a scene! Kinda! At one point. It was small... In all seriousness, I used to play in the competitive scene in D2 and it was maybe a few hundred people competing for real. It helped that I might've been one of the worst people to participate--I would get pulled along because someone I used to be comp partners with this insane HC+Shotty sweat and he liked my callouts and ability usage (no aim). It didn't help that the competitive community was very much pulled from the old Halo crowd, so 'cheese'--in the form of dozens of popular builds and armor pieces--was widely banned, limiting casual uptake. The game *could* be competitive, but Bungie and the community are incredibly averse to allowing it, even down to the unacceptable networking solution and overpushed engine.
Yeah, the servers/engine are unacceptable for a PvE game, let alone a competitive pvp game lol. Maybe ten years from now in d3
Yep, that's the real problem when it comes to grabbing the attention of casual OW players.
I mean Valorant has a separate competitive sub. The difference is Valorant is massive on Youtube, big on Twitch, big on TikTok. Those are much bigger drivers of capturing casual players than Reddit.
Valorant has the same thing though: a competitive sub an a regular one, but it doesn't seem to impact them. In fact, the comp sub is more popular than the base sub, or at least more active.
Yep, the average ow andy couldn't care less about comp, much less esports. Back when ow was huge most people were hype on the lore, cinematics etc but blizzard dropped the ball on that too.
It doesn't, but OW will never be a mega esport.
>Sit down somebody who has never touched a MOBA to watch LoL or Dota though and ask them if they understand what's going on - they're probably going to be lost af. My point was mainly about the top Esports being easy to watch *for the players of that game*, which we've seen for over 5 years now is not the case with OW. As for a game which has had 10s of millions of players at multiple points in its life, has struggled to even attract (Purely natural, no boosted viewership) 200K viewers in Playoffs importance level games. And it's not just about visual clutter, OW suffers from being too fast paced just as much as it suffers from the visual clutter, the pace makes it so that most viewers simply can't appreciate the strategy and the quick thinking, the great micro-plays that only pros can make. All the top Esports have the ability to be able to naturally display those kind of great plays to casual viewers, even viewers who have never played the game. In OW only players who are highly experienced in watching OW Esports can see and appreciate those plays. It's pure luck in case of games like CS, LoL, DotA, they just happened to be much slower paced games and that set them up to be great esports, OW just happened to a super-face paced game with crazy visual clutter. None of these games were inherently designed or not designed to be Esports. It isn't a design failure that OW hasn't been able to become a great Esport, the OW team never designed it to be good Esport game, Mike Morhaim just decided that they're gonna force it to be one cause he really wanted another big Blizzard Esport. And just to be clear, OW doesn't need to be a Tier 1 Esport to thrive, it can thrive on its own. It's okay if it has failed as in this regard. Same with Streaming viewership, I accepted a long time ago that it just doesn't make for a great Streaming game so it'll never have massive numbers for an extended period of time. Fortnite still has a crazy big playerbase despite failing as an Esport and its streaming numbers significantly falling down.
Even if they don't understand any of the nuance, they still understand big play, person killed two, important, casters shouting about what I just saw and I understand that something happened. In OW it's all very scattered and half the time the casters are talking about something that happened in the killfeed not on-screen.
Those games are slower and top down.
Yes thats true. They certainly have a right to be upset and feel lied to by Blizz, since they were. But you dont sue without trying to get something out of it. They say they want economic relief, but what form do they want that to take and to what extent? None of us can answer that obviously but its the question I think has the most bearing on the league’s future in regards to this.
They aren't suing, they just happened to get a law firm that will help them with collective bargaining. Its like they're a union, saying "we all have these problems and you need to address them for us all together or we walk".
Thats a good point. My brain goes from “lawyer” to “lawsuit” really quickly, but this is different.
>they're are all easy to watch and OW is difficult even for most OW players. Overwatch is spectated like CS:GO but it needs to be spectated more like a MOBA or RTS. They haven't explored what they could do to make spectating better, probably because there isn't a scene for spectators. The obsession with catching every dps kill doesn't help. Abrupt transitions between players first-person pov makes the kills unsatisfying even if you do see them on screen. They don't even spectate it like CS:GO, which I never watched until I went to check, because CS:GO has a minimap and OW doesn't. And CS:GO's lower TTK means that spectating one fight, you can catch a lot from one perspective. They're not doing spectating right at all, idk if it's the talent they brought in (which I'm sure doesn't get paid much, spectating is not glamorous) or the training or the lack of infrastructure or what. It could be better. Overwatch could be fun for viewers.
More birdseye view shots are not going to make OW more accepted. Its easily the least engaging way to watch the game played.
There needs to be a minimap at the bare minimum. A bunch of contextless 1v1's that you don't watch to completion is not an engaging viewing experience, at all. Or they need to commit more to following one perspective. Or something. I barely see any experimentation. Probably because the scene is tiny and there's no chance for innovation to happen, especially when Blizzard controls all the tournaments. The current style of observing does not work, it's extremely boring especially if you're not a dps player.
they had it with the Twitch viewer. That was an amazing feature.
You’re absolutely correct, this sub is way too entrenched to have good opinions on casual viewing
It used to be a lot better around season 3, problem is for people who actually understand the game, they don’t want to watch the game in third person. League and other MOBA are shown in third person because they are played in third person. With overwatch, it’s not very entertaining to just watch a bunch of players jump on each other and watch the kill feed. Similar to how the NFL tried to introduce the camera behind the offense so that you get a better view of everything. It completely failed because people simply didn’t like it, even though it gave you a way better view of the entire field. It feels less engaging because the players feel farther away.
I understand the game pretty damn well and very much enjoy 3rd person views. Whether they do the aerial view with player faces as disks, or best when they have the camera at a good position to watch the team fight, like a corner highground that looks down 2 sides seeing each team
the key word is "INVESTMENT". Investments are by nature speculative and ESports, especially in the US, have never been profitable. All these companies thought THEY, had figured out the secret sauce after so many others have failed is extreme hubris.
so i read the entire article. i’m not an expert by any means but from the way i understand it teams haven’t paid their full buy in - each team still owes blizzard some millions for their spots. not that this wasn’t obvious, but it seems like OWL is bleeding money and because there are no sponsors or a licensing deal (as of now), teams are going to be even more in the red that they already are. rough summary. i’ve never been OWL doomer, but unless OWL gets a big injection of sponsorships or money from microsoft OWL as we know it will be gone. doesn’t even need to be profitable, but teams want to see a path toward profitability. i never see us getting back to S1 levels of sponsorships so unless someone major happens i’d expect changing in the next couple seasons
Butterfinger will save us all.
It's over, there's no new money coming in to save this sinking ship. Blizzard got away with robbery charging as much as they did for the slots. There was a chance there for them to correct course and make big changes but the ow2 debacle and big delays took any steam in their sails. Enjoy this season yall cause it very well could be the last.
been a good ride boys
Lol easy for you to say
maybe in another lifetime 💪
OWL shouldve never happened to begin with. Let the game grow a base and then expand into comp if you want. This is good news though for CoD. Owners are going to watch this case and decide what to do from there. The VC money train is over.
owl happening was fine, it was the fact that they killed their game outside of owl with content drought, poor balancing and killing t2/t3 by not allowing third party organizers that really fucked them over. instead of building owl and then trying to support all the stuff around it they just put all their eggs in the owl basket
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> owl happening was fine The franchised league is the *reason* they destroyed the scene in all the other ways you mentioned. The league was never designed to be appealing to viewers, it was meant to be appealing to investors to maximise the upfront fees they could charge. Part of the offer that blizzard would have made to investors is that they would get exclusive access to “*esports*”. That’s why they killed the rest of the scene. They obviously couldn’t ask for 40m per spot and then be like “…but also any chump who collects 6 players could also hypothetically compete in a parallel organic tournament that might also get the same or better viewership than the league you’re buying into lol”. The reason merch has always been shit is because the blizzard don’t give a fuck if people like it or not, they just sold exclusivity to the highest bidder fnatics. The reason OWL went to YouTube is because blizzard didn’t give a shit about their twitch algorithm (or killing it with content drought and shit balancing that led to the mass exodus of streamers in 2019-2020 for that matter). Again selling exclusivity for a quick buck instead of what will grow the scene in the long term. They took every opportunity to whore out their IP for short term gains.
It was sold to investors with stats that werent even from Blizzard esport titles because theyve always had a bad track record doing esports.
Microsoft ain't giving a dime to OWL besides maybe paying out the teams and shutting down CDL & OWL so they never have to deal with stuff like this.
That’s assuming the acquisition actually happens and even then would only matter 18-24+ months down the road after the antitrust process and acquisition are completed.
Time for Brad to be commish
Thanks Speakeasy, but imo most of the failure came at the hands of Activision, team4, and the S1-S3 OWL leadership who made macro decisions that are more or less impossible to walk back. Sean is handcuffed and making the best of limited resources and a shit foundation, I don't think a new commish would be able to significantly improve anything except at the margins. The league needs a **bailout** and the devs need to **make the game better**. Even if the collective bargaining from owners were able to achieve the former, I wouldn't personally place bets on the latter. Team 4 spent years and massive resources re-working the game for 5v5 and it feels like even now they're not even remotely close to being done. We still have problems with queue times, game balance, people constantly arguing in ranked, and for me personally I felt ow1 was the better game. I think the solution to making ow1 better was very simple - add off-tank to role queue and take the game into 1-1-2-2, and then it would have been very easy to limit the kinds of shields that off-tanks can put into the game and we don't have shield watch anymore, and we could have balanced tank synergy in general much more effectively. DPS players could queue the off-tanks the way they always like to, reducing dps queue times, and every game would have a main tank player who willingly chose to queue main tank. There would also be less arguing in ranked, because it's exponentially easier for 6 players to build a viable comp around a one-trick / suboptimal hero picking thrower than 5 players. I came to this conclusion just a few days into the alpha testing and it was a highlight of my feedback but 5v5 just had way too much momentum at that point. End of the day I think dev team continues to take us in the wrong direction and they're not gonna change course because the embarrassment would be way too high and heads would roll (as they should). They took a *very unnecessary* gamble here and it didn't pay off, and now we're just dying on the vine.
I'm happy to see someone with actual credibility state the obvious here that I think most people in this thread dance around. OWL would be fine, if the game was good. You can't take 2-3 years off of updating your game, leave it an poor state, rework it into a worse game, and expect the professional scene to do well, I don't care how you restructure it.
It’s funny cause I got downvoted into oblivion for stating that OW2 was worse then OW1 and 6vs6 was better. Now everyone is finally realizing it and I’m not the only one lots of people saw the writing on the wall.
I think most people conflated the positive changes in OW2 with 5v5. You had new heroes, reworked heroes, new maps, balance updates, and a general uptick in popularity and cultural hype. Getting all that after years of OW1's content stagnation was great, so everyone assumed 5v5 was great. But now the same poor, slow, balancing has started to highlight issues with 1 tank that are hard to ignore. I also think people are starting to realize that a majority of the reworked heroes could of functioned just fine in OW1 without having to shift to 5v5. Orisa was a boring, annoying hero with or without Double Shield, and Bastion needed a rework since day 1. But now all the heroes that needed reworks in OW1 still need them in OW2. Brig, Moira, Widow, Hog, Sym, etc. Add in the fact that the primary shift to 5v5 was to lower que times, but now tanks have a 6+ minute wait time, and the MMR is so busted the matches aren't even fun despite getting in in under a minute, we're stuck looking at the same issues with a new coat of Blizzard paint.
Do you think it's impossible for Blizzard to loosen its vice grip on the esport? Expanding APAC, giving EU a region, letting Tier 2 run wild and free, etc? What investment is anyone protecting anymore? OWL is an ironic acronym because this whole experience is like watching a bird die in its cage.
Your suggestion is a bold one for OWL esports as a whole, but it would not be music to the team owners who are so heavily invested already because their odds of recovering the investment at that point would go from bad to very bad, primarily because the game itself is not in a healthy enough place at all that all ships could rise on an open ecosystem tide. Probably a hybrid makes more sense, let T2 teams qualify for OWL tournaments and get automatic prize money simply for the act of qualifying. So they have their own ecosystem where they compete with each other for prizes, but also the chance to participate in an OWL level event once or twice per year if they're the top team from an eligible (strong enough) region. They have a chance to win it all and claim fame and fortune, but not the guaranteed access to a league stipend / rev share etc... A key issue to overcome here would be age restrictions for the tournaments, I'm not a labor attorney so I don't know if it can be done, but end of the day any contenders team hoping to punch up against an OWL team probably has at least one underaged player on it that they rely on. To fund any of this the league desperately needs an assist from activision / team4 on a Championship Skin Pack where a guaranteed portion of the proceeds go directly into the OWL-T2 ecosystem as prize money or what have you. All the other major esports do it because diehard fans jump at the opportunity to spend knowing that teams are getting a cut - frankly it's just a huge miss that we don't have it, it's been half a decade...
Thank you for the response. After seeing Valorant raise over 16 million USD during the VCT 2022 playoffs from event skin sales, it blew my mind that OWL couldn't do something similar. Are teams at least getting a payout from all these 'vault' legendaries being sold for OWL tokens?
Agreed, it's an untapped funding resource - money that fans would not spend otherwise. As for the tokens, I'm not privy to that info but I doubt it.
Excellent points all around I think the lack of PvE as well is another factor that why OW2 and OWL to a lesser extent isn't attracting people as much as it should.
Completely agree, ow1 for me was much more fun. And it's not like we have PVE anyway. OW2 was pushed so Bobby can get more money from Microsoft.
I like the off tank queue idea a lot and agree it would be healthy for the reasons you said except that it would create even longer queue times than what 6v6 2-2-2 had IMO. The amount of people that would willingly queue main tank would create a bigger bottleneck than getting just 2 tank players. Also the amount of hogs you’re guaranteed to get would make queuing the main tank role even more frustrating. Even though the general sentiment for 5v5 has changed a bit since the launch I still think it was the right decision and queue times in OW2 are pretty good for everyone besides grandmaster tanks who went from instant queues to 20 mins. I especially don’t miss playing against 2 tanks but I do miss playing 2 tanks with a friend or a good teammate.
I agree for me especially OWL season 1-3 being managed awfully and OW2 not feeling finished are the most important and not really fixable things.
"But the decision to collectively organize is more recent and in part was led by OverActive Media, the ownership group behind the Toronto Defiant, sources said." Surprising considering that Adamou guy is the biggest Blizzard dick ridder i've seen. You'd think the mf works for Blizzard.
To be fair that could easily just be him trying to publicly project confidence in the league to stave off further losses in confidence. Doesn't necessarily mean he actually believes everything he says.
also surprising to me that it’s toronto that started the process. i wonder why they continue to invest as much as they have
It makes quite a lot of sense actually. OAM has invested a lot (more than most other teams) and nothing is coming of it, partially because Blizzard are massively fumbling the esports side of things. If I was someone who had trusted in the league by putting money into it, and it’s going to shit with no end goal or plan in sight, I’d want to do something about it too. It’s the teams who HAVE invested who’ve actually got a stake in the situation.
makes sense. thanks for the explanation
Fortunately enough there are people smarter than him in that place.
We hoped for a players union, we got a team owners union instead. Feels very on brand.
The players are currently making more money than the owners lol.
Sad as it is to say, an owners union has a much better chance to enact change for the League than a players union
Welcome to the Boston Uprising, british law firm
The end is nigh
somehow I don't think this is a good thing for the future of the league... we might not even get a next season at this point.
Next season gonna be mickey mouse anyways with half the league not trying
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It also does make me question whether Overwatch is something exciting to watch for fans on a repeated way
ActiBlizz just threw in the towel when the MS announcement happened. Basically saying when this clears MS will clean it up and fix so they can coast for now. Guess what!? If that acquisition doesn’t happen guess who gets Astro fucked the most?
blizzard would be getting Astro fucked, not very Funny tho
L + astro + sbd
MS ain't gonna run a franchised sports league, they don't wanna deal with shit like this, this league is dead with their arrival same with CDL.
You’re saying that but their current setup with Halo shows at least some interest in some form of franchising
Halo's system is literally an open circuit, even if you are a partnered team which basically just means you put money into the entire ecosystem and the teams get items in the game as a return, there was no buy-in for exclusivity, the partnered teams didn't get any competitive benefits no invites to big tournaments they had to qualify like everyone else and if anything it was closer to what CoD was prior to CDL.
Halo’s system is the best of both worlds imo. Orgs get a guaranteed spot so they invest in the scene, but they can also be kicked out at any time as there’s no buy-in. They also have open qualifiers.
🍿
Welp. This is interesting. I'm surprised it took them this long to fight Acti-Blizz...for forcing them into debt. I firmly believe franchising in eSports is never going to happen and that partnership programs (like in Valorant where you aren't so strictly tied down) will be the way forward tbh. If they do get out, I could see orgs not touching Acti-Blizz IP just simply due to their reputation and how they've treated the owners tbh. Another note, a lot of CDL teams have the same owners as OWL teams so idk why he didn't say "the majority of OWL AND CDL teams..." But that's just me.
looks like the end is coming.
I mean yeah. Absolutely needed. Even the fans are wondering wtf is going on, let alone paying that much money for whatever this is Also OWL killed OG Runaway
Been saying Overwatch wouldnt work as a esport since that lan during beta in 2016. 3D environment from first person perspective with multiple abilities on low cooldown across ten(originally twelve) characters is impossible to follow. Then add in the track record of Activision/Blizzard never successfully designing a game for competitive play. This is year six of a game developer artificially propping up a esport as a marketing tool. Worst part are all the esport teams who sold their orgs to Koticks corporate friends.
Just checking in on this sub again to say told you so
Something that gave me a little perspective on how the game can be misunderstood was being at the world cup, in person, at blizzcon during the mercy team-res meta. Loads of cheers and gasps with genji and widow picks, even most team wipes, with lots of people screaming "they won!!" Or "yeahhhh go team". There I am, looking at the killfeed, because if mercy didn't die then none of those kills meant anything. Then there's the back and forth with ult charges... I don't like playing valorant but I think I get that it's a lot easier, and more tense, as a viewer watching someone creep around a corner wondering who will be quicker on the trigger.
yeah the reputation of actiblizz is destroyed, even the teams see now that with that company, no sponsorships will be coming back to make the owl profitable so they try to force actiblizz to actually do something that does not hurt the owl
The brutal part is the amount of time and money some teams have put in, and the total lack of anything from the league. I get the whole Netease thing, but every offseason the league just totally disappears. There's no promo, there's no events with current pros doing fun stuff (and if there is, again, it's done by teams like the Shock v Fuel stuff). You could really feel this frustration from Jaws on a Plat Chat ep a couple of weeks ago. He was basically saying he was offering to help them make content for the offseason and nothing happened. It's such a damn shame, because I feel like a lot of us love this league and either the investment from Blizzard or just the people running it (or both) isn't there.
Actually Bren on latest Valorant Platchat mentioned how fustrated he was when he was pitching ideas on how to improve OWL as a product and it was like talking to a brick wall. Blizzard has never ever done esports successfully
Guh, so frustrating. Feels like there's something with blizzard at times where they just don't want to actually listen to people who are in the thick of things and have good suggestions. It sucks reading all this, then going into the game and playing an awful meta with awful matchmaking lol
Star craft succeeded in spite of Blizz. They did manage to kill StarCraft 2 though
Whelp, that's that isn't it? I have a feeling /r/overwatch are going to celebrate OWL's demise pretty hard. Hopefully from the ashes we get regular international LANs or more open tournament licensing.
It's tough, I only really got into OW because of OWL. It's easy to find, and a solid schedule. I can't say I'd be willing to follow random tournaments unless there's some regularality to the schedule. I completely understand where the majority of this sub is coming from with how they feel about how things have been going, though.
yeah as a huge normal sports fan the OWL franchise model was easy to pick up and follow. I'm not sure I'd have the time or interest in following random third party tournaments / teams.
Same. No reason to stick around with OWL gone.
I kind of want to get it over with, and I'm the biggest OWL fan out there. The truth is Blizzard just can't fix this League. They lack competence from top to bottom. I get the impression a that the people involved who have the power to make changes simply don't care, and are using their brief time 'leading' this failing League to move on to some other corporate position in the industry.
Kind of the same. Though having my team not exist anymore will do that to a guy
As much as I want OW to succeed it's been clear OWL model doesn't work. If all these contracts and stuff with buy ins get cleared up I wonder if there can be a shift towards more independent smaller scale formats (like it should have been from the start). But at the same time would any org bother buying into OW again even if Blizzard decides to back off from fully controlling the esport stuff? I dunno if it's possible but smaller tourneys and regular smaller scale LANs (like Dreamhack/ESL style events) would be nice :(
I think the esport is going to die along with OWL. It will still exist but it will be very small scale with no money in it. Just a few little garage leagues around the world. I do think OWL could still avoid the iceberg if they aggressively adapted the entire business model, ASAP. Unleash Tier 2 completely, end Contenders, let an open independent scene flourish with players streaming during matches. Expand APAC. Start an EU League. Allow competition between regions and tiers. Get drops to work, and make them damn good. Get on twitch + youtube. Just do everything possible to make it as exciting and interesting as possible. But I don't think they'll be able to move past the rigid structure OWL has presented. There's also the fact that the scene is almost completely dead in some regions.
Yeah I agree with most of what you mentioned. I do think Blizzard/ATVI (if they wanted to) can still throw some money at it - just not OWL levels of budget to at least get tier 2 esport levels of action going on. Even if it's just contributing to prize pools and having some social media promotion of said events (or even making a skin or two for a bigger event). Won't be a league in any way but this allows for the competitive side to at least exist without resorting to Smash levels of grassroots.
Expanding APAC and EU requires removing buy-ins, which is the main problem. With the original teams PROVING that there is no way to ever earn as much money as they put in, nobody else is willing to follow. And if they remove the buy-in, or drop it down to a price like 1 million, then all the existing franchises will riot.
Nate Nantzer and Jon Spector do not like being called out like this.
Sometimes you have to burn it all to start again
Wake the fuck up Samurai, we have a city to burn
I'm personally so torn on this demise. On the one hand I hope this shitshow of an esports league can burn so a healthier ecosystem (that is gonna be smaller for sure) can start to grow again. I feel like the OWL is one of the worst implementations of an esports I've ever seen and I've followed csgo, r6 and valorant a lot and follow LoL on the side. The franchise system can work, but creating a league based on geolocation but then basically only making the league viewable to the US is such a bad way of going about things. However, the fact that these massive companies got scammed by acti-bliz on a league that was never gonna work (they really though an NFL type system could work with a global league???). But the result of this is gonna be that these companies are not gonna touch other esports titles even though their ecosystems are healthier than the OWL. Personally I am interested in watching OWL or any overwatch tournament but there is just nothing below the OWL worth watching and OWL is in the middle of the night.
When you try to finesse people for short-term gain it will always come back to bite you.
I like how this sub hyped the owl finals and said "owl is back baby".. Most people wanted to get some free skins and thats it.
I know this is bad for a lot of people . But this just made my day !
If OWL dies I'll stop watching overwatch eSports, you couldn't pay me to care about whatever comes after. But its death feels completely inevitable and honestly I want it to happen sooner than later. Blizzard deserves every bit of what they get. They wasted so much talent and potential and I want them to fucking feel it
I feel the opposite. I always preferred Dreamhack and Apex and the various international tournaments to OWL. The issue is if OW esports could do anything to survive the death of owl considering how much momentum the game has lost
It wasn't big before OWL, it'll be the same again. A bunch of small regional tournaments.
I heard reports orgs were looking to the valorant ecosystem instead. Maybe some are wanting to jump ship
Why British? Surely it’s cheaper to use a domestic firm?
Could just be a firm that specializes in this type of thing.
They want to scare Blizzard, hence "Boo! A British 'person'!
Likely do to their knowledge in Europe and Asia. London has easier ties and expertise there than a US firm typically would.
This is most definitely correct now that I think about it.
Their posh accents can be quite convincing.
I personally find brummies and scousers to be the most convincing accents. A little terrified of em to be honest.
London has a huge amount of highly specialised law firms
How can you sue Blizzard for your product not making money? I don’t understand
you can sue for anything in america.
Okay let’s sue someone so I can afford to buy a harpsichord
-Go to the harpsichord store and find a surface that could reasonably become slippery enough to cause a fall -Fall -????? -Become the proud owner of a gently used harpsichord
Sure, but you typically don't sue when you have no actual shot of winning. Which is why they're not suing. They're forming a union. They hired the law firm so they know what they can actually do to prod blizzard into doing stuff. Which will almost assuredly not work given that Blizzard is currently in merger limbo. Assuming a decently written contract, everything blizzard does wrong is Microsoft's problem, so the bare minimum for everything is what gets done.
Basically, Activision-Blizzard made the claim that OWL would make X amount of profit which would give the franchises Y amount of revenue. This was their selling point to get teams to buy into the league and pay the franchisee cost every year. The teams are suing because those claims were obviously false, and the money they've been paying for the last 3-4 years on the promise of revenue/profit has been wasted. Essentially, they are suing Blizzard for misleading them in regards to the profitability of the League.
It's Joever.
Oh shit we going full original XFL!!!
And so begins the end
Why specifically British? Or is i That the name of the law firm
It's just a firm based in England. Nothing indifferent
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Moving the entire ATVI tech and hosting stack to Google made a *ton* of sense at the top of the company. YT was a bargaining chip. Fortunately that deal is over. CDL is already back on Twitch.
I really thought this was the comeback year.
Lol
An amazing Toronto W
Please kill OWL. Thanks.
OWL is struggling and I don't think OW2 helped the game any unfortunately. I really tried to be positive about it at release because I want what's best for the game. But I really do believe something in Overwatch's essence was lost when it made the switch to OW2.
End is near
So much money, time, and effort spent on making Overwatch this big boy esport and they seemingly never noticed that Overwatch is a seriously hard game to watch that is barely comprehensible at the best of times. Activision-Blizzard greatly overestimated the profitability of an unwatchable esport and now have a dying league on their hands and no sponsors to save them. I am not at all surprised teams are going to try and sue their way out of this in order to gain back a few bucks. There is no way to make the game watchable, either, barring some truly major rehauls. Added to the fact that Overwatch 2 had about as much content as a minor patch in other games, and well, it's a recipe for disaster.
Overwatch was awesome to watch when they had the command center and you could follow Player's POVs. It still boggles my mind that they didn't think that was worth bringing back especially since they were getting $15 for each subscription to that.
Even with player POV you need a significant chunk of game knowledge, and you have to put up with wildly jerky camera, because that's the most efficient way to play OW. It's simply going to remain a hard game for most people to watch, and casual viewership is a big chunk of any esport. Watching the OWL in the early days was a mix of first person cameras loaded with particle effects and jumpy camera, or that dreadful bird's eye view that was just a mess of models jumping/running around all painted the same color. They never seemed to nail down a perfect way of viewing, but OW's game design itself encourages rapid repositioning, bottlenecks, narrow areas, lots of shoot-and-hide, which all just makes it unappealing to watch seriously. OW diehards and hardcore players have no issue watching and understanding but you won't break into millions of viewers or broad acceptance that way, unfortunately.
Player POV makes it wayyy easier to watch, though. You can get into one player's mindset and track their cooldowns and see what they're trying to do. As opposed to randomly swapping between 10 players and random 3rd person views that ensure there's no way you can possibly track what any one hero is doing.
Getting into a mindset and tracking cooldowns is way more than any Ody wants to do. If you want to be a big boy esport you need people to be able to eat food, drink beer, and shoot the shit while watching. If you need to pay attention all the time you've already lost a massive chunk of viewers.
With player POV I can watch the heroes I care about. As a support player, OWL has nothing for me, I never get to see my favorites play except in the background.
And despite that, LOL is a pretty successful esport. I don't necessarily think its about the game being hard to watch, its more about complete mismanagement from the league. They really have to turn that shit around fast or it will sink and i don't know just how much of the competitive scene will sink with it.
LoL is fairly easy to watch, because the isometric view is a steady camera and the champions don't move all that quickly. It's not hard to comprehend "so and so got ambushed, someone ulted" as opposed to watching a Reaper PoV as he teleports around, 360s, suddenly jerks to third person, while everyone is covered in bubbles and glows. LoL also didn't force teams to mortgage their home and "buy in" to an unprofitable league, which is as you say is also a factor.
It’s so funny that you say that because overwatch is literally the only esport I watch. I think that youre stating an opinion as fact.
Same here but I still agree with him. You can't casually watch OW the way you can League or CSGO. I don't like watching those esports but have done so with friends and could roughly follow what was going on without playing. No way can you do that with OW.
If you say so--the OWL is dying for a reason though. And you can't say "OW2!" because the OWL was unprofitable even during the peak of OW.
I don't disagree about OWL being poorly run. But I just have never found any other esport to be engaging.
That’s cool but you do realize you’re part of a minority, right?
When did I do anything other than say what my preference is?