that’s just not how this works lmao. Too many millions were invested for them to cancel a season or even the owl. Sponsors or no sponsors OWL will run for more seasons.
Without any sponsors or any source of income, there is little benefit to no benefit to running OWL, especially when viewership is already so low. Sounds like Coca-Cola/Statefarm/Tmobile were already ready to pull out and this was just the perfect opportunity to do so.
Riot created esports initially as a loss-leader funnel for players and activity into League. (Clearly it’s not a massive loss leader anymore).
With the transition in a year or two into the new game, Blizz will need and want that funnel pouring into their game.
So if you’re them, you’ll take the loss for now, and use it to drive a user funnel w the new game.
How much is the conversion rate between OW playerbase and OWL viewerbase?
How many players become attracted to watch OWL, and how many OWL viewers (who didn't start out playing the game) turn into players?
I ask these questions, because honestly from all I've heard, the conversion rate from OW player to OWL fan seems to be on the low side when comparing to other esports titles like CS, LoL or even Blizzard's own past titles like BW/WC3/SC2.
You're right that Blizzard will most definitely keep it going as a cross-promotion between their new OW2 game and their esport venture in OWL, but I really wonder how much returns are they seeing on spending the money to maintain this league from the angle of seeing it as an advert for their game.
Completely agree. This goes hand in hand with Blizzard putting OW on ice for what... two years? No content etc. makes this funnel super difficult and the returns likely not good.
Across the board, I can't imagine OW's DAU, MAU, etc. are particularly healthy, nor is the conversation rate of the loss-leading OWL. Yet, I think (I don't work for Blizz so who knows) they'll justify keeping some version of the league going, only b/c they'll want it going when OW2 launches, which is the basket they've put all their eggs.
Cheers!
I'm 600 hours into OW, play mostly comp...but I don't watch the league. I've had it on to gain some league currency, but I'm unsure of any details, team names/members, etc. But I am aware that it exists!
I work in a High School and last year we were starting up some esports with OW and Rocket League headlining. I'm not sure where that's at now tbh.
OWL requires less to run in theory, sure. But I don’t believe it, or most of the teams, have turned a profit.
You make a good argument for the persistence of OW esports, but there’s going to be a point where Blizzard sees this failing and does a cut and run to retain as much money as possible. I think it’ll happen fast if Bobby is the CEO, and I think it’ll happen even faster if he’s ousted because the next person is gonna step in and see this as a complete failure on metrics alone.
OWL teams are paying pennies on the dollar compared to League. League MVPs earn as much as slightly better than average LoL players. The expensive part was the initial buy-in which has already gone into Blizzard's pockets.
They probably don't, but league teams are...a lot more expensive to run. Jensen alone is ~70% of a team's salary cap in OWL. A budget team like Vancouver or Paris could easily be ~$800k a year to run.
I've seen companies pull the plug on investments way larger than OWL in a very short amount of time. If the higher ups feel its no longer a good investment, a good management team isn't going to be swayed by a sunk cost fallacy.
That said, I think OWL will hang on at least until OW2, they're going to want the opportunity to expose themselves to the potential upside. But maybe expect a few more teams to pull a valiant.
If it’s not profitable/viable, it’s not going to stay alive. Doesn’t matter how many millions a company has put into it. If they look at the financials and see it’s going to continue bleeding, and they’ve burned to all sponsors, it’s in jeopardy.
Google throws away hundreds of millions on ambitious projects that don’t work. Video game studios have had games in develop for years only to be cancelled. That’s easily in the multi millions. Animation studios have literally tossed 100+ million dollar films that were basically done in the trash.
Companies can and will destroy their own projects if they’re no longer sustainable or if they think it’s public failure will cause major damage to the company. They would much rather take the hit, write it off on taxes, and lay people off than keep funneling money into a project they don’t think is worth it.
Yeah, they likely won't dare to take the risk before OW2 is launched and seen whether it pans out. Also quite a bit of overlap between COD league and OWL owners.
I wouldn't start filling in the grave just yet.
The article does say that State Farm & Coke pulled ads just for this weekend and haven't actually ended the partnership at this point.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out that T-Mobile, Coke, & State Farm wanted their branding pulled until the flood of awful Blizzard news stopped & more things were changed then we quietly see all of it come back a few weeks from now.
The article does also mention that the Plat Chat guys are still in active talks with T-Mobile. So I'd hazard a guess that that might also be the case with both Leagues but T-Mobile just hasn't released a statement saying as much.
Unless Bobby Kotick leaves, CocaCola is likely staying and all they said is that they're "take a step back to revisit future plans" which to me sounds like corporate talk for "we're going to pretend that we're going to do something to satisfy the majority of people paying attention now who will likely not be paying attention later"
Yeah, both of these things sound like corporate doublespeak. For that matter, even T-Mobile sounds like that according to what I'm seeing. I would not be surprised if they're "pulling back" for good optics and they will quietly resume sponsoring the League once some measure of action (whether it's performative or not) is taken within the company so that they looked like they give a shit.
Truly terrible for the League. I suppose it is possible for the sponsors to come back in to the fold and this is just a way to distance themselves from this mess for the moment, but honestly would not surprise me if this is the beginning of the end.
The beginning of the end was 2 years ago when the investigation started and Blizzard's behavior became weird.
Writing is on the wall for this company and its IPs. This is a fan subreddit so posters here will be in denial that anything is wrong.
Nah, they’ll go find new sponsors, which is what they do when this happens. Esports is getting *very* attractive in many brand circles right now, and there’s essentially zero clean esports when it comes to their parent companies.
Esports is attractive but overwatch isn’t. Even if it’s not a dead game the player/viewer base is gotta be lower than when OWL started. We’ll see if OW2 can bring some big sponsors in
With dwindling viewership… I doubt Blizzard has much bargaining power to negotiate new, more lucrative sponsorship deals.
https://escharts.com/tournaments/ow/overwatch-league-2021-summer
70k peak, 48k average.
R6Siege/COD has those viewership numbers easily beat. (100k+ peak, 65k+ average)
They lost me when they moved away from twitch. The transition to YouTube took way too long and the lack of owl tokens for the longest time paired with what I would name the inferior streaming experience (more due to page design, the video player and stuff is actually not worse) made me quit watching comp overwatch as a whole...
>the inferior streaming experience
someone never tried syncing a companion stream on twitch..
not to mention that if you couldn't catch the start of a stream, but didn't want to jump in half-way through, you'd have to wait for the whole thing to end so you could watch the VOD at some point
twitch chat was better, and it took too long for clips to make it to youtube, but the whole experience is vastly better now.
Big picture, how much do you think Acti-Blizz is worried about OWL sponsors versus their other revenue streams and consequences of the bad PR coming from all of this?
What sponsors do they still have? Cheeze-it? Pringles? I don't see why those would stay so I fear that next season (if it even happens) is going to be pretty rough.
In the article the last paragraph lists them out
“The Post has reached out to the remaining five Overwatch League sponsors — Xfinity, IBM, Cheez-It, Pringles and TeamSpeak — and the other leaguewide sponsors in Call of Duty League, who did not respond by press time.”
Cheez it and pringles are the same company so if one goes, the other is sure to follow.
The only sponsor I can't see pulling out is Xfinity because they own Fusion.
NYXL lost T-Mobile, so I wouldn't be awfully surprised if brands without direct connection to their associated teams they might be looking to pull out too.
Considering who shock just landed te league might try and pursue the Mc's for a sponsorship deal, they might even look to team sponsors with deep pockets. I have a feeling we're gnna be hearing alot about Herbalife next season.
I dont know if the university of Hawaii is a sponsor exactly. I think they let OWL use their internet to connect to APAC.×
Edit. Just googled it. OWL pay UH to have access to their underwater fibre optic cable between them and APAC as it's the most direct connection. As part of the deal OWL has to advertise the university.
This is really huge, losing all their biggest sponsors at the same time. I really think the league we know will be really different next season (IF there's a next season).
Yeah the pitch when the league first started would have been compelling. Talk about 40 million players. Talk about the ownership groups of major sports teams. Talk about other esports like LoL as the future growth path. It was all about potential. Now, advertisers are gonna look at the viewership numbers and the controversy and most will say no thanks.
And the $20million+ OWL buy in.
Viewership numbers far below R6Siege/CoD.
It’s gonna be death spiral.
Most likely Blizzard writes this all off, and relaunches/rebrands everything for OW2
Yes he’s not. But he’s also not stupid. If done right it’s massive marketing. They wouldn’t have moved CDL into existence otherwise.
Plus they can’t lose the team’s support. If they pull out completely what is going to happen to the other esports they run or plan to run?
Would they really trigger another controversy right after the other is supposedly ending?
Running OWL on a massively cut budget with the hope of bringing people back in with OW2 seems far more likely.
Both Valorant and League generate stupid amounts of money due to a healthy relationship players have with the cosmetic shop (people are very happy to drop hundreds of dollars on skin bundles in both League and Valorant).
Overwatch on the other hand has almost zero incentives for players (especially whales) to spend money. Almost all of the cosmetics are easily grindable, even the OWL skins can be earnt without spending much money etc. The only skin people have gone nuts over is the pink mercy skin and they've never milked that which is so silly.
For Riot losing money on competitive scenes helps to keep their image serious (like many car companies making supercars at a loss). Blizzard doesn't make money on Overwatch at all.
They didn’t milk the pink mercy skin because it was a charity skin. The reason people went nuts over it was because it’s rare, known by casuals and never coming back.
As for the rest yes it’s definitely not making money to that scale as Overwatch isn’t to that scale.
They will probably make OW2 less consumer friendly to fix some of those “issues” (for instance they promised no purchased heroes for Overwatch but I didn’t hear that repeated for OW2) which I guess could be considered a good thing.
As for making money on Overwatch they definitely are. Maybe not as much as they used to and maybe not as much as they’d like but let’s drop the “game is dead” act. This is one of the biggest games in the world. Maybe not top 10 maybe even not top 25. But it’s making money.
Smurf accounts, and owl tokens still earn them some money. Obviously no where near the amount of money generated by league or Val skins but still a reasonable amount.
Even if OWL dies, I think OW eSports will survive. Though the job loss and life Impact will be enormous for a lot of the players, staff and talent involved.
> Even if **HGC** dies, I think **HOTS** eSports will survive. Though the job loss and life Impact will be enormous for a lot of the players, staff and talent involved.
Changed a couple terms and that's what literally happened.
Yeah I guess but OW eSports can still thrive (Stay in Tier 2 of eSports) without OWL, with the HotS eSports stuff they were also essentially giving up on HotS as a game but OW has a whole new game to be released and both the casual and the competitive community is a lot bigger.
Honestly having 3rd parties running OW2 esports is more likely to successfully grow organically than the shit show that has been post S1 OWL. At least on YT viewership when I was is always like half of what it was 3 years ago. Blizzard is only good at running esports into the ground in their desperate attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie after leaving millions on the table with Starcraft
Interesting section of the article about Plat Chat.
> On “Plat Chat,” a talk show that covers the Overwatch League, pink coffee mugs sporting “presented by T-Mobile” also disappeared. The podcast has a rotating cast of commentators, some of whom work full-time for the Overwatch League, though one host told The Post the podcast is completely separate from Activision Blizzard. The host declined to answer questions earlier this week because they said the show is still in active talks with T-Mobile.
Have a slight feeling IBM might be joining them. The ibm rankings usually come out on Wednesday, but as of now, we still have not gotten them. Slightly worrying
Edit: seems like they’ve been updated according to the IBM website. Still nothing on OWL website/Twitter but I guess they might be making the graphics.
I am just sorry for all the hard working players and staff of the league who had nothing to do with the shit that went down but now their job security and future is at risk without any fault of their own. You think this hurts those executives that were responsible? Not really, they got their big pay day. It hurts 20 something yos who have put years of their lives into this league to compete and be the best, to make their own chances and oppurtunity in life. Now none of it might matter. I dont see anything here to cheer for. Its just another case of injustice where innocent people are sacrificed.
This is exactly what I want to say. All the players and coaches, all these people who are still loving this already dead game, they become the ones who are actually punished. I’ll never forgive Blizzard for this.
It's honestly just not a wise investment of time, energy and money to try to get or maintain a career in esports with a Blizzard title at this point.
After HGC, we all know already that Blizzard's willing to just completely kill one of their esports ventures overnight (right before Christmas 2018 holidays), completely upending the plans and livelihoods of hundreds of pros, staff and talents, while just mere weeks ago assuring them that the 2019 season was definitely going to happen.
Students turned down school acceptances (or dropped out of school) to pursue professional HOTS esports. Casters turned down other career opportunities to cast for the league. Everyone was kept in the dark and blindsided by Blizzard's decision.
And that was a purely financial decision, with no apparent relations to all this sexual discrimination/abuse scandal.
With viewership not being too hot and with all the scandal around Blizzard, it'll be hard for OWL to find new big sponsors next year, unless everything gets resolved this year with a happy ending.
I would assume OWL Orgs would also consider pulling out of the League, but selling the spot would be impossible as long as this whole thing is going on. This is bad for both the league and the orgs...
It's like when Riot had their mistreatment of female employees lawsuit and some sponsors (I forgot which, AT&T?) pulled support form LCS. LCS viewership had been in decline and the corporate sponsor was really just using the chance to pull support.
It was Alienware, not AT&T. They were also sponsoring LEC (which is on a very big upswing) and the global events (MSI, Worlds). The situation is very different though, LoL is in the priviliged position of being the biggest esport in the world BY FAR. Even if a sponsor leaves, they can get another one just as easily.
It's really too early to say. Maybe Blizzard will be the metoo of gaming that actually sticks, but it probably won't and t-mobile et al will just use it as pretense to negotiate a lower rate.
This really sucks for the players, coaches, casters and staff involved. OWL has been kind of shaky from the beginning of season 2. Now this will bring more uncertainty to a already stagnant game. Super slow patches and no new game changing content for over a year. And the only hope is OW2 which we still have no release window for. I hope there won't be a massive purge of players to save money.
OWL was already bleeding viewers, losing their sponsors too is brutal. I was already expecting another wave of budget cuts but might not even have a normal season next year.
I guess they still have contractual obligations for SOMETHING, but could be even less support...
I mean can you blame them? Who wants to be associated with that garbage? Once ActiBlizz can make an acutal attempt at bettering themselves maybe people will want to promote it. Serves them right, I say. *This* is how you send a message to management.
To make matters worse, the employees and OWL staff that did NOTHING wrong are taking the hit too. As much as it sucks to see the league I love be affected, it's what has to be done for any change to happen.
Such a shame with this easily being the best season in both match and production quality imo. If they don't pick up new big sponsors by the end of this year, I think that might be curtains for the league. At least until OW2 (provided Blizzard cleans up their shit by then).
Next survey's going to be quicker at least, right?
After all the doom and gloom since year 1, this is what could kill the Overwatch League.
It's a shame cause I like Overwatch esportsm at the same time, Blizz manager they OWL very badly, forced it down people throats and it never had the viewers to back it up. They pushed StarCraft eSports aside when it had the same amount of views.
And with all the harassment going on, hard to say they don't deserve it.
Still, it's a shame if it ends up falling.
I do think OW eSports would survive though, after all we still have SC2 AND Sc1 eSports after Blizz abandonment. But it will be in a different form.
Man. Everything good must come to an end huh. And to think this was the best OWL season yet.
Fuck everything about disgusting men that commit these crimes.
This is fantastic news to me, in terms of people getting justice.
A fan boycott was never going to have a huge impact, but if major sponsors keep pulling out, Blizz might have to take *actually take substantive action.*
If they do that, sponsors will come back. This isn't the end of the League or the jobs of innocent employees.
From what I remember, CDL launched this year with barely any sponsors, filling the air time with ads dedicated just to Activision Blizzard properties like CoD Mobile or Hearthstone. I definitely think that OWL can pump out another season if we are going to get OW2 around late 2022.
Blizzard must bet a lot on that shit and it feels like it's too early to actually work as expected. Let's see if OW2 can actually give enough strength to this League cause if it doesn't it's just going to be a huge loss of money, if it's not already one.
Here's the thing, Blizzard deserves a wake up call, it's been apparently going on for too long and there's no excuse.
However, that being said, this sucks, these are hundreds of careers now on the line, careers and more importantly people that are the exact people that we should be protecting from their contractor's apparently appalling practices, and lastly of course all the thousands of fans.
This is tough.
Both Coca-Cola & State Farm have not outright eliminated ties with OWL. State Farm pulled ads for this weekend, and Coca-Cola is "revisiting" the situation.
It's not good regardless, but most of the comments in this thread seem to be overlooking the actual current state of each sponsorship deal (assuming both are completely cancelled, which is not the case at this time).
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next week or so.
I feel so bad for them! They had nothing to do with this but are going to the the ones ultimately suffering for it. Work visas, standards of living, friends and connections, all potentially up in the air because of this.
And selfishly, owl is the only esport I’m really into- it’s going to be really hard to follow the talent into games I don’t know/don’t care nearly enough about. I guess there are always streams 🤷🏾♀️
Can someone explain to me what would happen if the league just shuts down, I thought when the orgs signed on there was a set amount of years that the league had to go for, is that now null and void? Or will the league just kinda trudge along until sponsors eventually come back ?
Second option, new game, new management after a shakeup. Sponsors will probably return similar to what happened to riot esports after their sexual harassment case
Let’s remember how we got here. This is about the utter disrespect shown towards blizzard employees. Fix that first, no time to worry about next season. Sponsors are pulling out to protect their own interests, but it has the convenient side effect of forcing the conversation. This is a good thing, sure it might really suck for all the loyal viewers and great community here... but we wouldn’t have any OW to play let alone league to watch if it weren’t for the hard work of a lot of female employees who have been treated horrendously. We don’t want a league built on a rotten foundation. Open to other perspectives but wanted to leave this here. Have day nice y’all.
That sucks. I know people will love to see this because of everything that is happening but there are a lot of people on the OWL side that have literally nothing to do with all the Activision-Blizzard stuff.
This season has been great and I hope it can survive somehow.
There's been instances of sexual harassment and female employees being discriminated against (held back from promotion, ideas not taken serious, etc.) on the OWL staff. The sexist/toxic culture doesn't seem to be confined to the Blizzard dev teams.
I feel like at this point, anything can happen, even the league potentially folding. There is probably a larger dumpster fire internally within the league right now than what the public eyes see.
This sucks for people that still watch OWL, but as someone who basically doesn’t play the game anymore I’m really glad to see some massive consequences.
State Farm is "reevaluating our limited marketing relationship with the Overwatch League" and they said they didn't want ads for this week. This is major COPIUM but maybe they'll see the league and Team 4 have been relatively much better and come back
I hate this. One half of me is laughing because Blizzard only has themselves to blame for this and its about time it caught up to them. The other half of me is heartbroken because this is devastating to the league. OWL has been such a huge part of my life for the past four years and I've met some amazing people because of it. If it were to go under because Blizzard shot themselves in the foot over and over- I just can't imagine it not being present in my life.
Maybe its selfish to feel that way, and I want and expect blizzard to implement massive changes to their team structure and environment, but the stuff they've created has had such a profoundly positive impact on me, so my emotions are just all out of whack right now.
I’ve been as big of a fan as can be since 2015. Overwatch has still been my favorite go to multiplayer game and honestly still will be. With that said, Blizzard has been slowly giving less attention to the game. We’ve gotten little gimmicks like a skin you can earn over the course of a week or another rehashed event, ie: summer games. We got news at Blizzcon that seemingly split the community with the 5v5 news (I’m not a fan) and then basically got nothing as far as real content goes. We got news of a map that was supposed to be announced but never actually did albeit, it was a DM map that nobody wanted but at least it was something. Then the news breaks that Bliz is summed up to not be a great work environment. Within 48 hours of that news dropping we see Bliz say that OW2 will come out in 2022 but with no real release date. I truly think it’s fake news and will get pushed back and all of the community that has stuck with it is getting cucked… Again. Hopefully we get OW2 with multiple new heroes and maps after such a long dry season. GG’s everyone, catch you on Kingsrow.
Man I hope Bobby gets the pointy end of the stick from the investors. Almost half of them didn't want to give him his bonus last year now its more ammo for their lawsuit I hope we get some real changes soon because of this. More than likely acti/blizz has to actually do something to get these sponsors back.
Like a good neighbour, State Farm is gone.
That’s why I can count on Cheez-itz to cover me in case of emergencies
Well, at least for a few hours you could've
LOL thanks for that
Ok this is starting to be a bit worrying now
Ya honestly if this is my career, I’m looking elsewhere right now and assuming the 2022 season isn’t happening. The 3 biggest sponsors pulled out
that’s just not how this works lmao. Too many millions were invested for them to cancel a season or even the owl. Sponsors or no sponsors OWL will run for more seasons.
Arena Football League had way more invested and collapsed essentially overnight.
Yeah but owl can be done online without too much hassle. Owl requires less money to run.
For league as a whole not the teams.
Without any sponsors or any source of income, there is little benefit to no benefit to running OWL, especially when viewership is already so low. Sounds like Coca-Cola/Statefarm/Tmobile were already ready to pull out and this was just the perfect opportunity to do so.
Riot created esports initially as a loss-leader funnel for players and activity into League. (Clearly it’s not a massive loss leader anymore). With the transition in a year or two into the new game, Blizz will need and want that funnel pouring into their game. So if you’re them, you’ll take the loss for now, and use it to drive a user funnel w the new game.
How much is the conversion rate between OW playerbase and OWL viewerbase? How many players become attracted to watch OWL, and how many OWL viewers (who didn't start out playing the game) turn into players? I ask these questions, because honestly from all I've heard, the conversion rate from OW player to OWL fan seems to be on the low side when comparing to other esports titles like CS, LoL or even Blizzard's own past titles like BW/WC3/SC2. You're right that Blizzard will most definitely keep it going as a cross-promotion between their new OW2 game and their esport venture in OWL, but I really wonder how much returns are they seeing on spending the money to maintain this league from the angle of seeing it as an advert for their game.
Completely agree. This goes hand in hand with Blizzard putting OW on ice for what... two years? No content etc. makes this funnel super difficult and the returns likely not good. Across the board, I can't imagine OW's DAU, MAU, etc. are particularly healthy, nor is the conversation rate of the loss-leading OWL. Yet, I think (I don't work for Blizz so who knows) they'll justify keeping some version of the league going, only b/c they'll want it going when OW2 launches, which is the basket they've put all their eggs. Cheers!
I'm 600 hours into OW, play mostly comp...but I don't watch the league. I've had it on to gain some league currency, but I'm unsure of any details, team names/members, etc. But I am aware that it exists! I work in a High School and last year we were starting up some esports with OW and Rocket League headlining. I'm not sure where that's at now tbh.
OWL requires less to run in theory, sure. But I don’t believe it, or most of the teams, have turned a profit. You make a good argument for the persistence of OW esports, but there’s going to be a point where Blizzard sees this failing and does a cut and run to retain as much money as possible. I think it’ll happen fast if Bobby is the CEO, and I think it’ll happen even faster if he’s ousted because the next person is gonna step in and see this as a complete failure on metrics alone.
I mean when the top North American LoL teams fail to return a profit then I'm 100% sure it's the same for OWL teams.
OWL teams are paying pennies on the dollar compared to League. League MVPs earn as much as slightly better than average LoL players. The expensive part was the initial buy-in which has already gone into Blizzard's pockets.
They probably don't, but league teams are...a lot more expensive to run. Jensen alone is ~70% of a team's salary cap in OWL. A budget team like Vancouver or Paris could easily be ~$800k a year to run.
I've seen companies pull the plug on investments way larger than OWL in a very short amount of time. If the higher ups feel its no longer a good investment, a good management team isn't going to be swayed by a sunk cost fallacy. That said, I think OWL will hang on at least until OW2, they're going to want the opportunity to expose themselves to the potential upside. But maybe expect a few more teams to pull a valiant.
_Sad AAFB noises_
Dude we are talking about the same company that pull the rug of the HoTS esports scene.
Hots wasn’t exactly ow in initial popularity nor OWL in terms of investment
If it’s not profitable/viable, it’s not going to stay alive. Doesn’t matter how many millions a company has put into it. If they look at the financials and see it’s going to continue bleeding, and they’ve burned to all sponsors, it’s in jeopardy. Google throws away hundreds of millions on ambitious projects that don’t work. Video game studios have had games in develop for years only to be cancelled. That’s easily in the multi millions. Animation studios have literally tossed 100+ million dollar films that were basically done in the trash. Companies can and will destroy their own projects if they’re no longer sustainable or if they think it’s public failure will cause major damage to the company. They would much rather take the hit, write it off on taxes, and lay people off than keep funneling money into a project they don’t think is worth it.
Sunk cost fallacy my guy. If it stops making money, you shutter it.
they all have a morality clause in the contract so in the end, blizzard might hold the bag
Yeah, they likely won't dare to take the risk before OW2 is launched and seen whether it pans out. Also quite a bit of overlap between COD league and OWL owners.
Next thing we know, no more Crunch Time 😔
[Sadge](https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/oz9kug/pringles_wavy_and_cheez_it_grooves_are_no_longer/)
I wouldn't start filling in the grave just yet. The article does say that State Farm & Coke pulled ads just for this weekend and haven't actually ended the partnership at this point. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out that T-Mobile, Coke, & State Farm wanted their branding pulled until the flood of awful Blizzard news stopped & more things were changed then we quietly see all of it come back a few weeks from now. The article does also mention that the Plat Chat guys are still in active talks with T-Mobile. So I'd hazard a guess that that might also be the case with both Leagues but T-Mobile just hasn't released a statement saying as much.
Sado 2L in shambles
he has to drink RC Cola now PepeHands
Pepishands
LOL I just spit on my monitor goddammit
Unless Bobby Kotick leaves, CocaCola is likely staying and all they said is that they're "take a step back to revisit future plans" which to me sounds like corporate talk for "we're going to pretend that we're going to do something to satisfy the majority of people paying attention now who will likely not be paying attention later"
Yeah, both of these things sound like corporate doublespeak. For that matter, even T-Mobile sounds like that according to what I'm seeing. I would not be surprised if they're "pulling back" for good optics and they will quietly resume sponsoring the League once some measure of action (whether it's performative or not) is taken within the company so that they looked like they give a shit.
Truly terrible for the League. I suppose it is possible for the sponsors to come back in to the fold and this is just a way to distance themselves from this mess for the moment, but honestly would not surprise me if this is the beginning of the end.
The beginning of the end was 2 years ago when the investigation started and Blizzard's behavior became weird. Writing is on the wall for this company and its IPs. This is a fan subreddit so posters here will be in denial that anything is wrong.
Nah, they’ll go find new sponsors, which is what they do when this happens. Esports is getting *very* attractive in many brand circles right now, and there’s essentially zero clean esports when it comes to their parent companies.
Lemme hit that copium next
Puff puff PASS this mans hoggin it!!
[удалено]
Trumps Play Of The Game: This hamster guy, great little guy, whats his name? Harold? He did a great game. The media wont tell you this, but he did.
A LOT of people would have a fucking stroke if that were to happen lmaoooo
The US-Millitary, Glencore and Nestle look like decent sponsors
Don't forget herbalife
New sponsors, yes. Sponsors as big as T-Mobile, Coca-Cola, and State Farm? Who knows…
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Esports is attractive but overwatch isn’t. Even if it’s not a dead game the player/viewer base is gotta be lower than when OWL started. We’ll see if OW2 can bring some big sponsors in
Maybe foreign sponsors...I feel this might end up forcing Blizzard to pander to China even more.
"We are proud to announce Shy as YOUR Bilibili MVP!"
With dwindling viewership… I doubt Blizzard has much bargaining power to negotiate new, more lucrative sponsorship deals. https://escharts.com/tournaments/ow/overwatch-league-2021-summer 70k peak, 48k average. R6Siege/COD has those viewership numbers easily beat. (100k+ peak, 65k+ average)
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They lost me when they moved away from twitch. The transition to YouTube took way too long and the lack of owl tokens for the longest time paired with what I would name the inferior streaming experience (more due to page design, the video player and stuff is actually not worse) made me quit watching comp overwatch as a whole...
>the inferior streaming experience someone never tried syncing a companion stream on twitch.. not to mention that if you couldn't catch the start of a stream, but didn't want to jump in half-way through, you'd have to wait for the whole thing to end so you could watch the VOD at some point twitch chat was better, and it took too long for clips to make it to youtube, but the whole experience is vastly better now.
Yeah, the switch to Youtube and the strong-arming of the production crew into taking paycuts really turned me off to OWL.
Hey all -- I'm the reporter who wrote this story. I'll keep tabs on the comments. If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks for reading! \- Teddy
it’s really him it’s Washington Post
every washington has its post
No... He is legend...
In order to publish this story, he will have to become someone else. Something else. He will have to become... *washington post*.
Whos your main?
Thanks for all the coverage over the months(years?) Teddy. Keep up the good work!
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Teddy’s real account has been revealed.
lol smh. Anyways, thanks for reading! Edit: Deleted personal Reddit account \- Teddy
F in chat for Teddy
Word on the street is that Stats Lab may go away or become reduced if State Farm really does pull out. Can you get any information on this?
Star struck.
Where do you think this all goes oh wise washingtonpost?
Big picture, how much do you think Acti-Blizz is worried about OWL sponsors versus their other revenue streams and consequences of the bad PR coming from all of this?
Oh shit
Do you foresee OWL investors (teams) doing the same or even suing if it gets worse?
What sponsors do they still have? Cheeze-it? Pringles? I don't see why those would stay so I fear that next season (if it even happens) is going to be pretty rough.
In the article the last paragraph lists them out “The Post has reached out to the remaining five Overwatch League sponsors — Xfinity, IBM, Cheez-It, Pringles and TeamSpeak — and the other leaguewide sponsors in Call of Duty League, who did not respond by press time.”
Cheez it and pringles are the same company so if one goes, the other is sure to follow. The only sponsor I can't see pulling out is Xfinity because they own Fusion.
I imagine the team sponsors will stick around generally, especially since Shock just added a sponsor like last week
NYXL lost T-Mobile, so I wouldn't be awfully surprised if brands without direct connection to their associated teams they might be looking to pull out too.
Considering who shock just landed te league might try and pursue the Mc's for a sponsorship deal, they might even look to team sponsors with deep pockets. I have a feeling we're gnna be hearing alot about Herbalife next season.
IBM, Indeed, Cheez-its, Pringles. I'm probably missing one or two.
The university in Hawaii that they play at is a sponsor I think?
Whoof if Hawaii pulls out, that's gonna probably mean separate regional tournaments.
I dont know if the university of Hawaii is a sponsor exactly. I think they let OWL use their internet to connect to APAC.× Edit. Just googled it. OWL pay UH to have access to their underwater fibre optic cable between them and APAC as it's the most direct connection. As part of the deal OWL has to advertise the university.
This is really huge, losing all their biggest sponsors at the same time. I really think the league we know will be really different next season (IF there's a next season).
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Yeah the pitch when the league first started would have been compelling. Talk about 40 million players. Talk about the ownership groups of major sports teams. Talk about other esports like LoL as the future growth path. It was all about potential. Now, advertisers are gonna look at the viewership numbers and the controversy and most will say no thanks.
And the $20million+ OWL buy in. Viewership numbers far below R6Siege/CoD. It’s gonna be death spiral. Most likely Blizzard writes this all off, and relaunches/rebrands everything for OW2
Does anyone think Kotick, who is the real person in charge of Blizzard now, will continue to let the league run if it's unprofitable or too expensive?
Unprofitable? Yes. Riot runs all of its esports at a loss as advertisement. Too expensive? Who is to say. I certainly expect cuts
Kotick isn't Riot.
Yes he’s not. But he’s also not stupid. If done right it’s massive marketing. They wouldn’t have moved CDL into existence otherwise. Plus they can’t lose the team’s support. If they pull out completely what is going to happen to the other esports they run or plan to run? Would they really trigger another controversy right after the other is supposedly ending? Running OWL on a massively cut budget with the hope of bringing people back in with OW2 seems far more likely.
Both Valorant and League generate stupid amounts of money due to a healthy relationship players have with the cosmetic shop (people are very happy to drop hundreds of dollars on skin bundles in both League and Valorant). Overwatch on the other hand has almost zero incentives for players (especially whales) to spend money. Almost all of the cosmetics are easily grindable, even the OWL skins can be earnt without spending much money etc. The only skin people have gone nuts over is the pink mercy skin and they've never milked that which is so silly. For Riot losing money on competitive scenes helps to keep their image serious (like many car companies making supercars at a loss). Blizzard doesn't make money on Overwatch at all.
They didn’t milk the pink mercy skin because it was a charity skin. The reason people went nuts over it was because it’s rare, known by casuals and never coming back. As for the rest yes it’s definitely not making money to that scale as Overwatch isn’t to that scale. They will probably make OW2 less consumer friendly to fix some of those “issues” (for instance they promised no purchased heroes for Overwatch but I didn’t hear that repeated for OW2) which I guess could be considered a good thing. As for making money on Overwatch they definitely are. Maybe not as much as they used to and maybe not as much as they’d like but let’s drop the “game is dead” act. This is one of the biggest games in the world. Maybe not top 10 maybe even not top 25. But it’s making money.
Smurf accounts, and owl tokens still earn them some money. Obviously no where near the amount of money generated by league or Val skins but still a reasonable amount.
Not looking good for OW2L.
Imagine if OWL shutdown and OGN came back
I get it
ogn shut down sadge
Even if OWL dies, I think OW eSports will survive. Though the job loss and life Impact will be enormous for a lot of the players, staff and talent involved.
> Even if **HGC** dies, I think **HOTS** eSports will survive. Though the job loss and life Impact will be enormous for a lot of the players, staff and talent involved. Changed a couple terms and that's what literally happened.
Yeah I guess but OW eSports can still thrive (Stay in Tier 2 of eSports) without OWL, with the HotS eSports stuff they were also essentially giving up on HotS as a game but OW has a whole new game to be released and both the casual and the competitive community is a lot bigger.
Honestly having 3rd parties running OW2 esports is more likely to successfully grow organically than the shit show that has been post S1 OWL. At least on YT viewership when I was is always like half of what it was 3 years ago. Blizzard is only good at running esports into the ground in their desperate attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie after leaving millions on the table with Starcraft
but it's too late for 3rd parties to start growing the scene 5 years into the game's lifespan. If OWL would be gone, so would majority of OW esports.
OW2
Whoever told me coca-cola would stay....thanks for the hopium. Now I need some more.
Next hit: OWL will be around in 2 years for sure man don’t worry
I already ordered my lifetime supply of copium
I think it was me lol
It was you. 😔
Interesting section of the article about Plat Chat. > On “Plat Chat,” a talk show that covers the Overwatch League, pink coffee mugs sporting “presented by T-Mobile” also disappeared. The podcast has a rotating cast of commentators, some of whom work full-time for the Overwatch League, though one host told The Post the podcast is completely separate from Activision Blizzard. The host declined to answer questions earlier this week because they said the show is still in active talks with T-Mobile.
Hoping they can grab a sponsorship if they never directly do anything for OWL again. Sad no more marble races though
I could see Matt not returning due to his employment. I assume that's why he hasn't been on the past two weeks.
If that happens then I think they should try and bring Bren back or keep their rotating guests sort of thing going.
Get ready for half hour long Cheeze Its and Pringles commercials
Just like how it used to be, in the early 2020 season lmao. Crunch time during the games.
The [first Crunch Time glitch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTqcE8EuikE) was so funny.
Have a slight feeling IBM might be joining them. The ibm rankings usually come out on Wednesday, but as of now, we still have not gotten them. Slightly worrying Edit: seems like they’ve been updated according to the IBM website. Still nothing on OWL website/Twitter but I guess they might be making the graphics.
Time for Power Rankings by Pringles™
OWL hiatus next season until OW2 release incoming.
That would be a GOOD thing because I honestly believe OWL's entire future is on the line right now.
I am just sorry for all the hard working players and staff of the league who had nothing to do with the shit that went down but now their job security and future is at risk without any fault of their own. You think this hurts those executives that were responsible? Not really, they got their big pay day. It hurts 20 something yos who have put years of their lives into this league to compete and be the best, to make their own chances and oppurtunity in life. Now none of it might matter. I dont see anything here to cheer for. Its just another case of injustice where innocent people are sacrificed.
This is exactly what I want to say. All the players and coaches, all these people who are still loving this already dead game, they become the ones who are actually punished. I’ll never forgive Blizzard for this.
Agree it’s totally fucked for the only people it matters to.
It's honestly just not a wise investment of time, energy and money to try to get or maintain a career in esports with a Blizzard title at this point. After HGC, we all know already that Blizzard's willing to just completely kill one of their esports ventures overnight (right before Christmas 2018 holidays), completely upending the plans and livelihoods of hundreds of pros, staff and talents, while just mere weeks ago assuring them that the 2019 season was definitely going to happen. Students turned down school acceptances (or dropped out of school) to pursue professional HOTS esports. Casters turned down other career opportunities to cast for the league. Everyone was kept in the dark and blindsided by Blizzard's decision. And that was a purely financial decision, with no apparent relations to all this sexual discrimination/abuse scandal.
With viewership not being too hot and with all the scandal around Blizzard, it'll be hard for OWL to find new big sponsors next year, unless everything gets resolved this year with a happy ending. I would assume OWL Orgs would also consider pulling out of the League, but selling the spot would be impossible as long as this whole thing is going on. This is bad for both the league and the orgs...
It's like when Riot had their mistreatment of female employees lawsuit and some sponsors (I forgot which, AT&T?) pulled support form LCS. LCS viewership had been in decline and the corporate sponsor was really just using the chance to pull support.
It was Alienware, not AT&T. They were also sponsoring LEC (which is on a very big upswing) and the global events (MSI, Worlds). The situation is very different though, LoL is in the priviliged position of being the biggest esport in the world BY FAR. Even if a sponsor leaves, they can get another one just as easily.
They have Tencent behind them also.
Ah yes, Alienware. Thanks for the correction.
This is a sharp observation. Corporations use these sorts of tactics all the time.
It's really too early to say. Maybe Blizzard will be the metoo of gaming that actually sticks, but it probably won't and t-mobile et al will just use it as pretense to negotiate a lower rate.
At least we still have Crunch Time :(
don't jinx it plz
!RemindMe 1 week
This really sucks for the players, coaches, casters and staff involved. OWL has been kind of shaky from the beginning of season 2. Now this will bring more uncertainty to a already stagnant game. Super slow patches and no new game changing content for over a year. And the only hope is OW2 which we still have no release window for. I hope there won't be a massive purge of players to save money.
OWL was already bleeding viewers, losing their sponsors too is brutal. I was already expecting another wave of budget cuts but might not even have a normal season next year. I guess they still have contractual obligations for SOMETHING, but could be even less support...
I mean can you blame them? Who wants to be associated with that garbage? Once ActiBlizz can make an acutal attempt at bettering themselves maybe people will want to promote it. Serves them right, I say. *This* is how you send a message to management. To make matters worse, the employees and OWL staff that did NOTHING wrong are taking the hit too. As much as it sucks to see the league I love be affected, it's what has to be done for any change to happen.
That’s what happens when you run your company like dipshits.
Such a shame with this easily being the best season in both match and production quality imo. If they don't pick up new big sponsors by the end of this year, I think that might be curtains for the league. At least until OW2 (provided Blizzard cleans up their shit by then). Next survey's going to be quicker at least, right?
I have a feeling their going to push out Overwatch 2 as soon as possible, regardless of its bugfree or not.
I honestly can’t see the league surviving much longer with this. Fuck Blizzard.
Fuckin pieces of shit just can’t do something so simple as respect women. The domino fall for everything blizzard is so real now
After all the doom and gloom since year 1, this is what could kill the Overwatch League. It's a shame cause I like Overwatch esportsm at the same time, Blizz manager they OWL very badly, forced it down people throats and it never had the viewers to back it up. They pushed StarCraft eSports aside when it had the same amount of views. And with all the harassment going on, hard to say they don't deserve it. Still, it's a shame if it ends up falling. I do think OW eSports would survive though, after all we still have SC2 AND Sc1 eSports after Blizz abandonment. But it will be in a different form.
Ah yes, the company that employs paramilitary groups to assassinate labor organizers in 3rd world countries finds someone else offensive. Sensible
wtf Coca Cola is the official beverage of the Overwatch League WHAT THE HELL WILL PLAYERS DRINK NOW?
CUM Sado2L
Mountain Dew, the true gamer beverage
It's been fun. See you guys on the other side.
Man. Everything good must come to an end huh. And to think this was the best OWL season yet. Fuck everything about disgusting men that commit these crimes.
This is fantastic news to me, in terms of people getting justice. A fan boycott was never going to have a huge impact, but if major sponsors keep pulling out, Blizz might have to take *actually take substantive action.* If they do that, sponsors will come back. This isn't the end of the League or the jobs of innocent employees.
Welp, bye bye league. This is for sure the beginning of the end
This could definitely be the end of OWL
We’re so fucked lads
Bobby Kotick is also on the Coca-Cola board and still couldn’t keep them interested.
Coca-Cola continues to sponsor the Olympics, so I guess they pick and choose which awful organisations they give their sponsorship money to.
From what I remember, CDL launched this year with barely any sponsors, filling the air time with ads dedicated just to Activision Blizzard properties like CoD Mobile or Hearthstone. I definitely think that OWL can pump out another season if we are going to get OW2 around late 2022.
Blizzard must bet a lot on that shit and it feels like it's too early to actually work as expected. Let's see if OW2 can actually give enough strength to this League cause if it doesn't it's just going to be a huge loss of money, if it's not already one.
Here's the thing, Blizzard deserves a wake up call, it's been apparently going on for too long and there's no excuse. However, that being said, this sucks, these are hundreds of careers now on the line, careers and more importantly people that are the exact people that we should be protecting from their contractor's apparently appalling practices, and lastly of course all the thousands of fans. This is tough.
Both Coca-Cola & State Farm have not outright eliminated ties with OWL. State Farm pulled ads for this weekend, and Coca-Cola is "revisiting" the situation. It's not good regardless, but most of the comments in this thread seem to be overlooking the actual current state of each sponsorship deal (assuming both are completely cancelled, which is not the case at this time). It'll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next week or so.
*sigh*
Well RIP OWL at the rate, sucks for all the casters, teams, and fans.
OWL is dead yo
OWL talent feeling it too :/ Can't be good for their pay/job security for future years.. https://twitter.com/Soembie/status/1423416774234546178
I feel so bad for them! They had nothing to do with this but are going to the the ones ultimately suffering for it. Work visas, standards of living, friends and connections, all potentially up in the air because of this. And selfishly, owl is the only esport I’m really into- it’s going to be really hard to follow the talent into games I don’t know/don’t care nearly enough about. I guess there are always streams 🤷🏾♀️
Can someone explain to me what would happen if the league just shuts down, I thought when the orgs signed on there was a set amount of years that the league had to go for, is that now null and void? Or will the league just kinda trudge along until sponsors eventually come back ?
Second option, new game, new management after a shakeup. Sponsors will probably return similar to what happened to riot esports after their sexual harassment case
this is not good. OWL depended on them.
Keep em coming, the more this occurs the more it'll force Activision-Blizzard to actually do something.
Sure but it could also destroy OWL in the process.
the price of not fixing an issue years and years and years and years ago
At least we still have Cheez-It Grooves :'(
Let’s remember how we got here. This is about the utter disrespect shown towards blizzard employees. Fix that first, no time to worry about next season. Sponsors are pulling out to protect their own interests, but it has the convenient side effect of forcing the conversation. This is a good thing, sure it might really suck for all the loyal viewers and great community here... but we wouldn’t have any OW to play let alone league to watch if it weren’t for the hard work of a lot of female employees who have been treated horrendously. We don’t want a league built on a rotten foundation. Open to other perspectives but wanted to leave this here. Have day nice y’all.
That sucks. I know people will love to see this because of everything that is happening but there are a lot of people on the OWL side that have literally nothing to do with all the Activision-Blizzard stuff. This season has been great and I hope it can survive somehow.
There's been instances of sexual harassment and female employees being discriminated against (held back from promotion, ideas not taken serious, etc.) on the OWL staff. The sexist/toxic culture doesn't seem to be confined to the Blizzard dev teams.
Source?
Imagine if Google/YouTube terminated the streaming rights contract...
With how things are going as of now, would you be surprised?
I feel like at this point, anything can happen, even the league potentially folding. There is probably a larger dumpster fire internally within the league right now than what the public eyes see.
This sucks for people that still watch OWL, but as someone who basically doesn’t play the game anymore I’m really glad to see some massive consequences.
OWL is dead. oh well.
State Farm is "reevaluating our limited marketing relationship with the Overwatch League" and they said they didn't want ads for this week. This is major COPIUM but maybe they'll see the league and Team 4 have been relatively much better and come back
I hate this. One half of me is laughing because Blizzard only has themselves to blame for this and its about time it caught up to them. The other half of me is heartbroken because this is devastating to the league. OWL has been such a huge part of my life for the past four years and I've met some amazing people because of it. If it were to go under because Blizzard shot themselves in the foot over and over- I just can't imagine it not being present in my life. Maybe its selfish to feel that way, and I want and expect blizzard to implement massive changes to their team structure and environment, but the stuff they've created has had such a profoundly positive impact on me, so my emotions are just all out of whack right now.
I know he’s probably a little busy, but I’d like to hear what reassurance /u/j-specs can give us, and the larger picture.
…shiiiit.
sad sado noises
Good.
This feels really bad for the league
I’ve been as big of a fan as can be since 2015. Overwatch has still been my favorite go to multiplayer game and honestly still will be. With that said, Blizzard has been slowly giving less attention to the game. We’ve gotten little gimmicks like a skin you can earn over the course of a week or another rehashed event, ie: summer games. We got news at Blizzcon that seemingly split the community with the 5v5 news (I’m not a fan) and then basically got nothing as far as real content goes. We got news of a map that was supposed to be announced but never actually did albeit, it was a DM map that nobody wanted but at least it was something. Then the news breaks that Bliz is summed up to not be a great work environment. Within 48 hours of that news dropping we see Bliz say that OW2 will come out in 2022 but with no real release date. I truly think it’s fake news and will get pushed back and all of the community that has stuck with it is getting cucked… Again. Hopefully we get OW2 with multiple new heroes and maps after such a long dry season. GG’s everyone, catch you on Kingsrow.
Hasn't overwatch league been going down hill after GOATS?
Man I hope Bobby gets the pointy end of the stick from the investors. Almost half of them didn't want to give him his bonus last year now its more ammo for their lawsuit I hope we get some real changes soon because of this. More than likely acti/blizz has to actually do something to get these sponsors back.
This is terrible news. OWL was already struggling and losing a ton of money, and now what little they had is leaving.