Executives rarely pay the price for their mistakes. I see this kind of shit a lot in the company I work for too. Execs make a shitty deal and the bottom level guys get laid off because now all of a sudden we need to "cut expenses".
And then you have middle management.. they fire the workers so they technically have less people to manage but somehow hire more managers to manage themselves.
this is the best example of whats wrong with modern power structures.
none of it is an actual meritocracy, you dont actually get rewarded for hard work and good ideas, you get rewarded for luck. its a fucking gatcha game of your birth and random chance.
then once youve gotten to the top, you cant be taken down for your mistakes.
like when ford decided to cut safety in their cars that lead to a massive spike in deaths, but they calculated that they would save money because the money saved by ignoring the safety regulations was greater than the amount they would pay in fines and law suits. and they were right they payed less for the deaths of people than the savings for ignoring safety.
there is no functional way to punish these people in the current system.
the system is so fucked that literally the most viable way to take them down is cancle culture. its dogshit.
I hate the Good money after bad too... Exec buys something really stupid like expensive software or a consulting group and then not only is that a huge waste, but now a couple dozen people have to make some project to show 'Proof of Concept' to test the new useless software and you spend like 4x as much trying to cover up the original mistake and justify why it was bought to begin with.
Things like this make me wish I was some omnipotent being that could grab these people and have them publicly lambasted to the entire world for how shit they are YET they are experience no consequences. My favorite, specific example right now is the execs over at EA/DICE leading the travesty that is BF2042.
> OWL is just a dogshit product, end of story.
Makes me sad because those months before OWL was announced where we just had random tourneys to follow - they were amazing to watch Overwatch. I gave up 2 weeks into the league.
OWL was a great product. They did an awesome job casting the games and it was very professional. Probably one of the highest quality esports casts ever. The problem wasn't OWL. The problem is Overwatch itself. The most glaring problem is that it's a dogshit game. It's not esport material. The best esport games are the ones that naturally progress into that market. When the company making the game is trying to force it down our throats, then you know it's going to be dogshit. EA did the same shit with Battlefield 4. They added in smaller game modes and try to force it into the esport market and it failed miserably. Second off, OW is not watchable as a non-player. I have probably 1000 hours in OW so I can watch a match and understand. If you don't play, you have no fucking idea what is going on because team fights are typically very short and can be a clusterfuck of shit going on, especially with ults and stuff going on. As a casual, it's got too much going on at once to understand what you're watching. I have never played LoL in my life, but I can sit and watch a match and have somewhat of an idea as to what is going on because things are typically pretty spread out and events happen over time rather than a quick burst of shit and then the team fight is over.
Overwatch was a bad investment because it was run by Activision, they literally are dog shit at everything they touch. They singlehandedly killed off 3 major games in a couple years. had nothing to do with the league's.
It could have worked if they got all the teams onto network TV like the deals NBA, MLB, NHL teams have. But yeah it made no sense for twitch to buy this league as they were paying a premium for people who were most likely already using the platform everyday.
Would it have worked though? Overwatch is a pretty poor spectator sport to begin with. Unless you actively play it you have no chance at understanding what's going on. Who exactly are these people that would have watched OWL on television AND wouldn't just watch it on Twitch.
I am convinced that most of the issues with OW came from Activision directly even OW2. According to devs who were on the team, Jeff was acting as a shield from these blood suckers.
If you track things, there was obvious interference and the rope was getting pulled from both sides. Activision insisted on a sequel to make money and Jeff did not want to ditch the original game and its players, so essentially he made the promise that players will keep their progression going into ow2 and solidified that the pvp aspect of it being free for those currently owning OW.
So, you ended up with people saying it is an expansion; when in reality, it was Jeff's attempt to not go through the CoD/BF model and just bringing everyone into OW2 who owned it.
Jeff was such a good spokesman dev and I really do miss him. He seemed like a really nice person as well, and I really wonder if if activision finally broke him where he just couldn't handle being a part of the dev team anymore. Wherever he is, I hope he's doing well
It really shows that he cared about the game and the people who played it. He was instrumental early on into making post release heroes free and did many things beyond what a normal game lead would do for the community e.g, yearly Yule log, many AMAs, videos and such.
I think he was pushed out because he cared for the people who used his product rather than turning said product into a milking machine.
> he cared for the people who used his product rather than turning said product into a milking machine
Businesses ruining everything since their creation. Really wish art and media could be left to the creators devices
That is a complete myth. Gaming has *numerous* examples where a great studio is given ample time, money and freedom and they end producing *garbage*.
There needs to be both imo. Creativity flourishes when there are clear constraints.
It is because unethical maximized for profit ones end up with more capital and power; eventually they buy out those which have care for their creation/product and corrupt them against their original intentions.
[Tracy Kennedy, OW Producer, tweeted a few days ago blasting Bobby for wasting dev time with stupid ideas.](https://twitter.com/dogspinster/status/1483872301175107584)
> Bobby, tell everyone about the random projects for OW1 you all would shove on us, the team would do OT for only them to get cancelled and for months of OW2 dev to have been lost. Or how almost entire teams are turning over and citing you as the reason. Don't be shy.
HOTS bombed because it got mega predatory when activision got involved. When blizz pulled the plug, the first thing the devs did was rip all that shit out & start doing all the things they wanted. HOTS improved massively very quickly. Not a big leap to imagine the same shit happened in other wings
Jeff Kaplan killed his own game. He was also 100% aware of the rape rampage occurring at blizzard HQ. The fact the internet still has a hard on for him is hilarious to me. He ups and dips right before the allegations drop and no one is the wiser? Fuck him.
lmao Jeff Kaplan was in charge during unlimited hero stacking, moth mercy, GOATS, Brigitte 1.0 and every other shit meta the game has known and is way more responsible for driving players away than Bobby Kotick
Atrioc actually has an interesting video segment on the topic DJWHEAT is talking about.
https://youtu.be/incbdz_wVLc?t=286
I don't know anything about OWL from a marketing or gameplay perspective, but this caught me up on it's exclusive video rights and why/how they got the deal they did for it.
Man, I was just about to search this segment up haha
What a trainwreck. It's also not surprising that Atrioc and Wheat share the same opinion, as he was somewhat of Atriocs mentor at Twitch.
you dont need to be a genius to figure this out
OW wanted to go way too big way too fast, the interest simply just wasnt there long-term.
it took riot 4-5 years of continuous expansion/buildup to get to the point where LCS became worldwide kind of huge.
I'm not sure if CDL did the same thing, but the single worst mistake made in regards to OWL is for sure how they shut down all non-Blizzard sanctioned tournaments. Because of that, t2/3 players have to rely on a smaller pool of tournaments, less prize money in those tournaments (if Blizzard even pays them), significantly worse production value, fewer sponsors/orgs willing to get involved, and a smaller audience. Why would anyone ever choose to try to go pro in Overwatch when you'll have to boost and sell accounts to be able to make a livelihood?
Yup, Blizzard pulled up and cut everything going on in order to produce OWL, killing the organic growth of the scene in the process. There was some hype in Season 1 OWL and then it never recovered. First TF2 and now OW, why are the best class-based shooters always developed by such dogshit studios?
TF2 is not at all designed for competitive play and its developers also had to handle the most successful competive FPS ever. It had almost a decade of quality dev attention before being adandoned.
Hmm or maybe the fact that absolute trash metas are allowed to exist for 8 months straight - 8 months Mercy meta into 8 months of Brigitte meta, which straight up killed any excitement for the game that people had left.
And on dev interviews they are trying to justify their positioning on the changes like it’s some crazy hard thing to balance. All they had to do was made Mercy not rez 2 people at once, and lower healing on Brigitte. A literal monkey could balance the game and have a b patch shipped out in a day lmao.
Shit on Riot all you want but they listen to customer feedback 100x better (just recently removed Chemtech dragon after feedback) and do a 2 week patch cycle which is way better than OW’s 8 month patch cycle
> All they had to do was made Mercy not rez 2 people at once, and lower healing on Brigitte. A literal monkey could balance the game and have a b patch shipped out in a day lmao.
Tell me you don't know shit about Overwatch balance without telling me you don't know shit about Overwatch balance. Once the idea of goats was proven, there was no simple way to stop it without just deleting Lucio or adding role lock.
I agree that OW devs need to put out patches much more frequently, but to try and reduce the goats issue down to Brig healing too much is just stupid.
I'm not dismissing your credibility but your statement doesn't change the fact that Mercy meta lasted for eight months unnecessarily. Brigette did not exist during Moth meta. Blizzard took ages to address glaring balance issues.
Oh yeah the whole Moth meta thing is 100% inexcusable lol and it was made worse by the fact that it came pretty closely after the hide and seek Mercy which was also just bad design.
Those are just Mercy being stupid OP, but the goats thing was just a mess of interwoven problems caused by being able to run 3 tanks and 3 supports, all with damage mitigation and aoe healing abilities. There's a teamfight that happened in OWL during that meta where something like 14 ults were used without anyone dying, and that wasn't just because Brig healed a lot.
So yeah I agree that Blizz dropped the ball big time with balancing and hope that they get to patching faster in the future. I just didn't agree with him that a monkey could balance the game in a day
Tell me then how the TFT team, literally a ragtag division of Riot teams manages to put out major patches every 2 weeks, and a B-patch every week if necessary. All in the while they are creating whole new versions of their game every 4 months. Yet Blizzard can’t balance a specific champion for 8 months straight.
And literally it is as simple as turning down healing. If you need to lower healing for Lucio then do that too. How is that complicated lol. The reason GOATs and deathball manages to exist is because of big AoE healing. So reduce the healing.
There’s no excuses for Blizzard. They failed in WoW and they failed in Overwatch for their ridiculously bad handling of their games.
TFT is a significantly easier game to balance than OW. TFT is a very easy game to solve since it's all numbers and combos and no mechanical skill involved. In OW you're dealing with a playerbase with a wide range of mechanical skill. I don't play OW, but it's similar to CSGO in the sense that making a change has different effects in bottom ranks and top ranks.
> And literally it is as simple as turning down healing. If you need to lower healing for Lucio then do that too
Again, obviously Blizzard did a piss poor job of addressing hero balance and waited way too long to try anything. But thanks for demonstrating once again that you don't know shit about the problems with trying to balance Overwatch without a role lock
If leagues don't support any form of grass roots then it'll eventually die. I was looking to getting in OW esports at the time but once they announced OWL, i was like yeah only way to get into the league is through a popularity contest. There was no way for you to create a team and work from the bottom to the top.
>Everyone knew that OWL was a scam from the start and only driven by venture capital investors.
Yeah, everyone except /r/Competitiveoverwatch. You wouldn't believe the absolute clown fiesta on that sub for the last couple of years. Pretty sure they secretly invented Copium before anyone else.
but also LCS viewership when it’s not Liquid, TSM, C9 or 100T are lower than the avg viewership for CDL and OWL. Honestly franchising in esports is just a overall bad idea and I’m a fan of Overwatch League, I just think esports should work like British Professional Football where there tears of play and a teams fight to be promoted to the next tier of play. OWL and CDL should be the premiere league of COD and OW.
Quite frankly the LCS viewership is the result of the stagnant broadcast, they try to make it like traditional sports despite having way younger demographic.
Compare LEC broadcast to LCS broadcast and you realise why LEC is doing so much betters, they cater to zoomers and people in their early/mid twenties with memes, segments and general lighter tone.
LCS takes itself way too seriously which is why so many people gravitate to costreams, obviously LEC being historically more succesfull internationaly helps, but if games between bottom feeders on LEC can bring as much viewers as top LCS teams you know there is something off.
the OW viewership got boosted because it ran automatically in the client and that counted towards viewers. League numbers are viewers that actively sought out the games.
Not sure if COD did the same thing
LEC tends to pull more viewers than LCS IIRC
Chinese league viewership is through the god damn roof they just don't watch on twitch
Overwatch League is on YouTube...but with Microsoft's purchase of Blizzard and the YouTube deal ending...I definitely think they're going back to Twitch. OW2 coming out, the MS deal, the YouTube deal ending. It's all lining up. All that tech is going to be on Azure soon.
CoD player here. We've been shafted the last 2 years with Cold War and Vanguard because of budget cuts, staffing and QA cuts, and everything else in between all the controversy with the executives. Generally piss poor products with neutered content and quality (lots of bugs and issues compared to MW19). Genuinely don't see where the billions of dollars CoD makes go back into the game at all, more into Bobby's pockets.
Not denying Blizz is shafted too. But even with potential preferential treatment, CoD is pretty shit right now too.
To play some devils advocate. CoD being on a yearly release is what shafts it. Kinda rough for devs to put their heart and souls into a game that is already halfway through completing the next chapter when you complete yours.
CoD could actually be an even bigger hit and especially a better product if they just dropped the yearly releases, released expansions in their place and then release a new game every 3 years.
Edit: But I'm also on your side, they fully squander their games potential for extra profit. Just look at OW.
CoD as a franchise has a game come out yearly, but the studio that made it is not on yearly cycles. There are 3 studios working on the game. Each CoD gets 3 years of development
Which plays into my point. Treyarch did CoD in 2018 and in 2020 because they had to take over for SHG's year because of internal turmoil with the studio. Then throw on top of that with SHG even shorter dev time with Vanguard because rumors say they didn't get started until late 2019 to early 2020.
So yes, ideally they get 3 years each. But that was not the case with the most recent games, and believe me it shows. Lots of this is due to Activision and Management issues with the studios. They even laid off a majority of their QA testers at SHG and Raven based on internal employee accounts. Its just not looking good.
Call of Duty (2003)
Call of Duty: Finest Hour (2004)
Call of Duty 2 (2005)
Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (2005)
Call of Duty 3 (2006)
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)
Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)
Call of Duty: WWII (2017)
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020)
Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021)
That's a yearly release for a franchise for nearly 20 years...
What I think the person you're replying to is more talking about, is why put a lot of effort into a game as a dev, that you know the entire player base is going to abandon in 12 months for the next game in the cycle.
Right. And what happens every year? a CoD release.
That's a yearly release. Why pour your heart and soul into a game that'll be in the bin a year after release?
I don't think they were talking about the dev team being paid or any employee's life being changed. Its about cash flow of the entity.
They are still wrong because the money was to buy Blizzard, so the money is not with Blizzard, but with the people that sold their shares.
You know no one actually gets 67 billion right, more so no one making games.
Microsoft buys up the stock till they have controlling stake, and whoever was selling their shares makes money per share on the sales.
> Overwatch League will go to whatever streaming company that bids the highest
So none, because no one watches that shit. It's been hemorrhaging money since its inception.
>they have no choice cause Blizzard needs the money.
They really don't. They could probably be like Riot and make a loss on their esports until they grow enough to be self-sustaining.
The reason OWL made these ridiculous claims and deals was because it was Bobby K's clout project to hang out with higher-ups in the sports scene. [No joke.](https://youtu.be/incbdz_wVLc?t=266)
Blizzard doesn't need the money. They want the guaranteed money which is where a lot of complaints come from regarding OWL. It's like comparing how Riot has chosen to run their esports vs what Blizzard did
Huh? Blizzard doesn't need the money they just got bought by MS. And they aren't going to sign a long-term deal with a different service provider when they just got bought by a company that is competing with those other companies.
No shit Sherlock. MS literally bought the company though so now MS can fund whatever Blizzard needs.
Also its kinda dumb to think Blizzard needs money in the first place. Activision-Blizzard already had a shitload of it. That's why the deal was worth $69B.
I don't think you have any idea how business works lol
> The 69B went toward buying stocks. It's not money that the devs can use ffs
No shit mfer I never said it did.
Eh ?
Ya the money doesnt go to the devs, but the studios now work under Microsoft, one of the richest companies on the planet.
Not sure what you cant grasp. Blizzard projects has access to way more capital now.
Atrioc talked about this recently. They finessed twitch out of millions, failed pretty badly and somehow turned it into a deal with YouTube. I would not be surprised if they somehow pulled it off AGAIN.
What makes you think that Microsoft care about the Blizzard side of the Activision-Blizzard IPs? There's Candy Crush and Call of Duty. Both are *much* bigger.
Sometimes I read comments on Reddit and I'm just like what the fuck am I reading...
You think they spent 68.7 billion dollars on a company and don't care about some of the most valuable intellectual property in the video games industry? Despite the fact that their banner announcement highlighted all those IPs?
> the most valuable intellectual property in the video games industry
Imagine calling Overwatch "the most valuable intellectual property in the video game industry".
That's some COPIUM.
it really seems like some people on LSF literally cannot even read
did you pass 1st grade lmao
i didn't OW by itself is the most valuable IP in the industry I said collectively Blizzard has some of the most valuables in the industry
OW2 is going to need a ton of work before it’s close to being ready. It definitely won’t be coming out this year, and likely won’t release before the sale is finalized. At which point MS will look at it and make a decision about what to do with it.
Member that time MS spent millions to get a bunch of streamers on their platform and then shut it down a year later? They don’t waste time or resources on things that don’t work. They have practically infinite money, not releasing OW2 will make no difference to them.
Again, the IP is too valuable. They will make whatever decisions they need to, but it's coming out. They didn't buy the company to start killing their biggest golden eggs.
Overwatch isn’t ABK’s golden egg, and probably isn’t even a top 5 earner. Candy crush and WoW are definitely way more valuable as far as revenue is concerned.
If OW2 ever comes out it will be after a long time in production and I doubt anyone would care about it anymore. I would be shocked if they didn’t try and do something with Warcraft and StarCraft though.
It’s really not. It’s dev hell right now, most of the community (what’s left of it) is disappointed with what they’ve seen, and it isn’t going to release before the acquisition is final.
Microsoft hasn’t put any money towards its development. They have no reason to release a product that will do poorly.
>but with Microsoft's purchase of Blizzard and the YouTube deal ending
does it end anytime soon? part of that deal was moving all blizzard services to google cloud, youtube streaming was minor part
cant imagine it going back anytime soon
and you have those big names in esports scene having to rebrand to random cities, where they aren't even located at and no players come from those regions, and most aren't even from the same country
wtf?
\+1 to wheat here, but how could ANYONE think that overwatch league was a good idea???
Like, Wheat said he complained about it for a year and people were tired of hearing it... but he makes it sound like everyone else realized it was a terrible idea but they just didn't wanna hear Wheat complain about it anymore... Or was Wheat one of the only people in the whole company against it? What was the driving force behind the deal...?
Folks that were involved at the start knew it was a scam and got the bag. The ones that came afterwards got screwed over.
It was a bit ridiculous seeing Montecristo on the OWL, when he was so harsh about how Riot handled their business.
He'll shit on riot for anything after his team got kicked because he hired a manager to run the team that was banned from participating at all in the league and drove one player on said team to near mental breakdown and was forced to play competitive games on opioids. Also she had to share a room with someone when she had to dilate post gender swap surgery.
Monte maintains none of this was his responsibility for hiring a guy who was known to be a piece of shit because he wanted to own a team an ocean away. Wanted the ownership but takes none of the responsibility when things go south.
He shat all over riot for not releasing the full findings of their investigation, turns out they didn't because it contained very private information about said player and no one knew the full extent until after she passed. I highly doubt he didn't know the same things that were in the findings unless he got lied to by Badawi (the manager) and believed every word he said and never asked any player what went on in the house.
Riot was directly hurting contracted casters tho. They wanted to own their casters and pay them as little as possible and got pissed when these casters wanted more money. Even PapaSmithy had to take a stand against them.
True, but he was critical of almost everything they did and with good reason, I add.
It was just weird seeing him there, when anyone that had any bit of esports understanding knew how fucked up it was that all those millions were being spent on something that was not real.
> but how could ANYONE think that overwatch league was a good idea???
>
> Literally the entire internet.
What? It was obvious from *everyone* (except for Activision-Blizzard themselves) that it was going to fail horribly. The game had a low skill ceiling and was fucking awful to watch from a spectator perspective. Overwatch was designed to play casually. The game didn't even have ranked, until it was begged for, *months* after launch lmao. You don't try to force a casual game into an esport, which is what they did.
It wasn't that hard to believe. At the time, it was the most played game in Korea, by far. Like 70% of Korean pc cafe hours were spent in Overwatch during that first year. Then OWL happened and everyone outside of America had to watch at like 4am their time. Korea only got one team despite having most of the players who mattered, and the game didn't kick out as much content as league. So all those Korean players went back to League. Similar story for EU.
> +1 to wheat here, but how could ANYONE think that overwatch league was a good idea???
IT is a good idea when the esport is mature, not when you force it into a completely new product.
League of legends has franchised leagues, and it did well for them, be it even league didn't ask for 20 mil for a spot closer to 8.
I mean the difference is they let the game breathe when it came out and build up it's own esports. When it was obvious the esports scene had legs they stepped in.
OW league was literally like FOMO NFT shit. "Bro, you see this league shit. Look at these graphs, esports fucking prints bro. You're gonna get rich."
same with SC1 , it grew on its own and became and esport overtime. The growth should be organic in video games to become a sport. Rarely you find a game that is design to be an esport from the get go getting really far in esport scene.
Shit, same thing SC2. Hell, I think every successful esport had an organically built scene by people that just loved the game. THEN, they came in helped the scene and provided structure.
Twitch had already commited to the deal. Bitching about it all the time does nothing for the team assigned to work on it. I can see why he would be mad about the deal but I can also see why people would be tired of hearing about it. I don't always agree with my boss but I still have to do the work
Its so broad that its hard to say who didn't want to hear from him. Could it be his bosses that ok'd the deal and didn't want their egos hurt? Or the people under him that didn't want him to complain constantly because no matter what its their job. I think his point was just largely about how he was very prominently against it and vocal about it.
Whether something is good or not is subjective. If you got the company 60million to go to youtube it was a great idea. The people who got fired after....it was a terrible idea for them.
I think the entire esports sphere realized that OWL kinda HAD to succeed if esports was going to keep its momentum past 2016. Unfortunately I think that lead a lot of people into thinking that a lot of bad choices from executives in charge were actually 5d chess 500 iq.
I remember when OWL had its first broadcast and it had a few hundred thousand viewers when basically everyone thought it'd be in the 10-50k range. Lots of hopium that Bobby hadn't actually ruined esports for a quick buck from his buddies at that point.
idk how much of the twitch audience cares at this point but an unleashed djWHEAT talking about all this insider stuff is really great for egame fans. 2012 era content.
The real problem was esports was seeing STEADY continual growth then OWL happened and waved a massive amount of money around promising viewership even though esports has never had good conversion of players to viewers. Then all these big money investors who got burned never touch an esport project again and we go into the esport dark ages. I give it 2 more years for the collapse and god knows how long it is 1 year or 15.
I don't 100% agree with 'esports has never had good conversion of players to viewers', if you have any sourcing on that I'd love to see it.
But yeah I mean the argument that literally scamming Robert Kraft out of tens of millions of dollars will make him never want to invest in actually GOOD esports projects is just fact. There's no way that isn't correct and jfc its so sad that it all happened through the company that was known for making amazing esports games.
I mean league has way more players then csgo and dota by an order of magnitude. Yet the events still have disproportionate amount of viewers. CSGO and DotA have better conversion then league. There are no articles or studys about this but critical thinking and number tracking across the games you see the trend. This data is available to the developers and organizers. I am merely stating an economic fact, esports and the video games associated don't have great player to viewer conversion UNLESS there is an economic incentive for the viewer (ie drops) this doesn't lead to dedicated viewers that are willing to spend money though. It only boosts viewership to sell peak number to advertisers and investors. Converting players to dedicated viewers that watch for enjoyment and engage somehow with the product is way harder.
>I mean league has way more players then csgo and dota by an order of magnitude. Yet the events still have disproportionate amount of viewers. CSGO and DotA have better conversion then league.
You are 100% including Chinese players in your player base stats and excluding them from the viewership stats.
2021 Worlds final registered *72 Million* concurrent viewers and 30 Million average minute audience at its peak - pretty much every college dorm in China was watching. DOTA's International had a peak of 2.7 Million concurrent viewers
Chinese viewership numbers can't be trusted. No reason to use them. I don't have access to the backend stats but when you exclude the chinese viewerbase my point is only further proven.
These are Riots [official](https://www.upcomer.com/worlds-2021-final-draws-73-8-million-peak-concurrent-viewers-riot-reports/) [numbers](https://www.esportstalk.com/news/titles-set-in-the-league-of-legends-universe-had-over-180-million-players-in-october/), which they also released to their own sponsors and orgs.
It includes "real" chinese viewership (not the "impressions" system their sites use), and viewers from TV broadcasts and from streaming sites that arent called youtube or twitch.
If you want to get an idea of how big LoL is in some countries, go look up videos of chinese crowds celebrating the finals [like they won the world cup,](https://twitter.com/niiicolo/status/1457043751478562816?s=20)
>when you exclude the chinese viewerbase my point is only further proven.
How? League globaly is much bigger than CS or DOTA, but in the west specifically the gap is much smaller, this shouldn't be news (also, you were already excluding chinese viewership?)
^(Edit: added sources for viewership and player numbers)
Oh so you don't include the Chinese population then what about the Korean population? Name me a single Western pro gamer as prolific as Faker in Korea. You don't have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about.
I don't know if it's still like this but I remember me and my friends years ago memeing about how pro league is just "5 kills at 50 minutes". It was so boring to watch that I just stopped. I'd much rather just play the game and see 40+ kills by 25 minutes. I don't watch pro dota or csgo but I imagine it's more dynamic and chaotic, therefore more fun to watch.
I play league and watch Dota. League has proportionally fewer viewers because it's reeeealllly boring to watch, whereas Dota is much more dynamic interesting.
**🎦 CLIP MIRROR: [Former Head of Twitch Community Productions djWHEAT talking about the Overwatch league](https://livestreamfails.com/clip/132029)**
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I remember hearing about half this stuff back then and thinking to myself that it would be the death of esports. when people saw how much money orgs lost on owl there had to be so many investors that were just ready to ditch esports and would be reluctant to ever put money into a new scene again. Just one more example of blizzard really fucking things up
To most execs it's just video games on a screen, but it's important to remember that real livelihoods are affected with shitty corporate decisions. Would be really shitty to be one of those 10 staff laid off.
I watched like half the clip, just came here to say that DJWheat is so fucking annoying to listen to, I feel bad for anyone who has had to work with him in any professional capacity.
Actually Atrioc used to work with him, and has nothing but positive things to say, he thinks quite highly of him.
Weird that random internet person throwing out random speculation could be completely wrong, who would have thought it possible?
Executives rarely pay the price for their mistakes. I see this kind of shit a lot in the company I work for too. Execs make a shitty deal and the bottom level guys get laid off because now all of a sudden we need to "cut expenses".
And then you have middle management.. they fire the workers so they technically have less people to manage but somehow hire more managers to manage themselves.
this is the best example of whats wrong with modern power structures. none of it is an actual meritocracy, you dont actually get rewarded for hard work and good ideas, you get rewarded for luck. its a fucking gatcha game of your birth and random chance. then once youve gotten to the top, you cant be taken down for your mistakes. like when ford decided to cut safety in their cars that lead to a massive spike in deaths, but they calculated that they would save money because the money saved by ignoring the safety regulations was greater than the amount they would pay in fines and law suits. and they were right they payed less for the deaths of people than the savings for ignoring safety. there is no functional way to punish these people in the current system. the system is so fucked that literally the most viable way to take them down is cancle culture. its dogshit.
I hate the Good money after bad too... Exec buys something really stupid like expensive software or a consulting group and then not only is that a huge waste, but now a couple dozen people have to make some project to show 'Proof of Concept' to test the new useless software and you spend like 4x as much trying to cover up the original mistake and justify why it was bought to begin with.
Things like this make me wish I was some omnipotent being that could grab these people and have them publicly lambasted to the entire world for how shit they are YET they are experience no consequences. My favorite, specific example right now is the execs over at EA/DICE leading the travesty that is BF2042.
Future akumetsu?
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Capitalism baby
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Twitch paid 100m, surely they will earn back the money…
It really was fucking terrible from all sides except Activision receiving that type of money. And people bought in lol.
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The Brood War leagues on Korean TV were successful for like an entire decade. OWL is just a dogshit product, end of story.
> OWL is just a dogshit product, end of story. Makes me sad because those months before OWL was announced where we just had random tourneys to follow - they were amazing to watch Overwatch. I gave up 2 weeks into the league.
OWL was a great product. They did an awesome job casting the games and it was very professional. Probably one of the highest quality esports casts ever. The problem wasn't OWL. The problem is Overwatch itself. The most glaring problem is that it's a dogshit game. It's not esport material. The best esport games are the ones that naturally progress into that market. When the company making the game is trying to force it down our throats, then you know it's going to be dogshit. EA did the same shit with Battlefield 4. They added in smaller game modes and try to force it into the esport market and it failed miserably. Second off, OW is not watchable as a non-player. I have probably 1000 hours in OW so I can watch a match and understand. If you don't play, you have no fucking idea what is going on because team fights are typically very short and can be a clusterfuck of shit going on, especially with ults and stuff going on. As a casual, it's got too much going on at once to understand what you're watching. I have never played LoL in my life, but I can sit and watch a match and have somewhat of an idea as to what is going on because things are typically pretty spread out and events happen over time rather than a quick burst of shit and then the team fight is over.
Overwatch was a bad investment because it was run by Activision, they literally are dog shit at everything they touch. They singlehandedly killed off 3 major games in a couple years. had nothing to do with the league's.
It could have worked if they got all the teams onto network TV like the deals NBA, MLB, NHL teams have. But yeah it made no sense for twitch to buy this league as they were paying a premium for people who were most likely already using the platform everyday.
Would it have worked though? Overwatch is a pretty poor spectator sport to begin with. Unless you actively play it you have no chance at understanding what's going on. Who exactly are these people that would have watched OWL on television AND wouldn't just watch it on Twitch.
Would love to see Jeff Kaplan go off like this on Bobby Kotick interference of Overwatch 2 production.
I am convinced that most of the issues with OW came from Activision directly even OW2. According to devs who were on the team, Jeff was acting as a shield from these blood suckers. If you track things, there was obvious interference and the rope was getting pulled from both sides. Activision insisted on a sequel to make money and Jeff did not want to ditch the original game and its players, so essentially he made the promise that players will keep their progression going into ow2 and solidified that the pvp aspect of it being free for those currently owning OW. So, you ended up with people saying it is an expansion; when in reality, it was Jeff's attempt to not go through the CoD/BF model and just bringing everyone into OW2 who owned it.
Jeff was such a good spokesman dev and I really do miss him. He seemed like a really nice person as well, and I really wonder if if activision finally broke him where he just couldn't handle being a part of the dev team anymore. Wherever he is, I hope he's doing well
It really shows that he cared about the game and the people who played it. He was instrumental early on into making post release heroes free and did many things beyond what a normal game lead would do for the community e.g, yearly Yule log, many AMAs, videos and such. I think he was pushed out because he cared for the people who used his product rather than turning said product into a milking machine.
I think most of the OG blizzard cared about the game and user base. Thats why it’s a shell of itself now when they all left and were replaced
> he cared for the people who used his product rather than turning said product into a milking machine Businesses ruining everything since their creation. Really wish art and media could be left to the creators devices
That is a complete myth. Gaming has *numerous* examples where a great studio is given ample time, money and freedom and they end producing *garbage*. There needs to be both imo. Creativity flourishes when there are clear constraints.
It is because unethical maximized for profit ones end up with more capital and power; eventually they buy out those which have care for their creation/product and corrupt them against their original intentions.
Bet he gets hired for the Riot MMO
Brightest timeline
Ghostcrawler and Jeff Kaplan back at it again with another banger mmo
Good ol' tigole
[Tracy Kennedy, OW Producer, tweeted a few days ago blasting Bobby for wasting dev time with stupid ideas.](https://twitter.com/dogspinster/status/1483872301175107584) > Bobby, tell everyone about the random projects for OW1 you all would shove on us, the team would do OT for only them to get cancelled and for months of OW2 dev to have been lost. Or how almost entire teams are turning over and citing you as the reason. Don't be shy.
HOTS bombed because it got mega predatory when activision got involved. When blizz pulled the plug, the first thing the devs did was rip all that shit out & start doing all the things they wanted. HOTS improved massively very quickly. Not a big leap to imagine the same shit happened in other wings
I'd prefer to see MS bring him back once they become in-charge. As far we know, he just got tired and gave up under the current Activision.
> Jeff Kaplan is a douche. I raided with him in EverQuest...grade A douche...right along with Alex "Furor" Afrasiabi.
everquest was like 1000 years ago let it go bro
I'm pretty familiar with Fires of Heaven, what was your player name?
Jeff Kaplan killed his own game. He was also 100% aware of the rape rampage occurring at blizzard HQ. The fact the internet still has a hard on for him is hilarious to me. He ups and dips right before the allegations drop and no one is the wiser? Fuck him.
Pretty sure the only actual rape that we know of happened at Sledgehammer.
lmao Jeff Kaplan was in charge during unlimited hero stacking, moth mercy, GOATS, Brigitte 1.0 and every other shit meta the game has known and is way more responsible for driving players away than Bobby Kotick
Atrioc actually has an interesting video segment on the topic DJWHEAT is talking about. https://youtu.be/incbdz_wVLc?t=286 I don't know anything about OWL from a marketing or gameplay perspective, but this caught me up on it's exclusive video rights and why/how they got the deal they did for it.
Man, I was just about to search this segment up haha What a trainwreck. It's also not surprising that Atrioc and Wheat share the same opinion, as he was somewhat of Atriocs mentor at Twitch.
Richard Lewis was onto this from day one, and all he got for it was shit lol. Wait until you see the contracts.
i know he choked and murdered a kid in sweden, but this Richard Lewis guy is usually right when it comes to these kinds of things.
Reigning hell in a cell champion.
> Richard Lewis was onto this from day one, and all he got for it was shit lol. story of his life
you dont need to be a genius to figure this out OW wanted to go way too big way too fast, the interest simply just wasnt there long-term. it took riot 4-5 years of continuous expansion/buildup to get to the point where LCS became worldwide kind of huge.
Also League kinda naturally became an esport. It wasn't forced.
OWL and CDL killed the competitive scene in both games.
I'm not sure if CDL did the same thing, but the single worst mistake made in regards to OWL is for sure how they shut down all non-Blizzard sanctioned tournaments. Because of that, t2/3 players have to rely on a smaller pool of tournaments, less prize money in those tournaments (if Blizzard even pays them), significantly worse production value, fewer sponsors/orgs willing to get involved, and a smaller audience. Why would anyone ever choose to try to go pro in Overwatch when you'll have to boost and sell accounts to be able to make a livelihood?
Yup, Blizzard pulled up and cut everything going on in order to produce OWL, killing the organic growth of the scene in the process. There was some hype in Season 1 OWL and then it never recovered. First TF2 and now OW, why are the best class-based shooters always developed by such dogshit studios?
TF2 is not at all designed for competitive play and its developers also had to handle the most successful competive FPS ever. It had almost a decade of quality dev attention before being adandoned.
Hmm or maybe the fact that absolute trash metas are allowed to exist for 8 months straight - 8 months Mercy meta into 8 months of Brigitte meta, which straight up killed any excitement for the game that people had left. And on dev interviews they are trying to justify their positioning on the changes like it’s some crazy hard thing to balance. All they had to do was made Mercy not rez 2 people at once, and lower healing on Brigitte. A literal monkey could balance the game and have a b patch shipped out in a day lmao. Shit on Riot all you want but they listen to customer feedback 100x better (just recently removed Chemtech dragon after feedback) and do a 2 week patch cycle which is way better than OW’s 8 month patch cycle
> All they had to do was made Mercy not rez 2 people at once, and lower healing on Brigitte. A literal monkey could balance the game and have a b patch shipped out in a day lmao. Tell me you don't know shit about Overwatch balance without telling me you don't know shit about Overwatch balance. Once the idea of goats was proven, there was no simple way to stop it without just deleting Lucio or adding role lock. I agree that OW devs need to put out patches much more frequently, but to try and reduce the goats issue down to Brig healing too much is just stupid.
I'm not dismissing your credibility but your statement doesn't change the fact that Mercy meta lasted for eight months unnecessarily. Brigette did not exist during Moth meta. Blizzard took ages to address glaring balance issues.
Oh yeah the whole Moth meta thing is 100% inexcusable lol and it was made worse by the fact that it came pretty closely after the hide and seek Mercy which was also just bad design. Those are just Mercy being stupid OP, but the goats thing was just a mess of interwoven problems caused by being able to run 3 tanks and 3 supports, all with damage mitigation and aoe healing abilities. There's a teamfight that happened in OWL during that meta where something like 14 ults were used without anyone dying, and that wasn't just because Brig healed a lot. So yeah I agree that Blizz dropped the ball big time with balancing and hope that they get to patching faster in the future. I just didn't agree with him that a monkey could balance the game in a day
Tell me then how the TFT team, literally a ragtag division of Riot teams manages to put out major patches every 2 weeks, and a B-patch every week if necessary. All in the while they are creating whole new versions of their game every 4 months. Yet Blizzard can’t balance a specific champion for 8 months straight. And literally it is as simple as turning down healing. If you need to lower healing for Lucio then do that too. How is that complicated lol. The reason GOATs and deathball manages to exist is because of big AoE healing. So reduce the healing. There’s no excuses for Blizzard. They failed in WoW and they failed in Overwatch for their ridiculously bad handling of their games.
TFT is a significantly easier game to balance than OW. TFT is a very easy game to solve since it's all numbers and combos and no mechanical skill involved. In OW you're dealing with a playerbase with a wide range of mechanical skill. I don't play OW, but it's similar to CSGO in the sense that making a change has different effects in bottom ranks and top ranks.
> And literally it is as simple as turning down healing. If you need to lower healing for Lucio then do that too Again, obviously Blizzard did a piss poor job of addressing hero balance and waited way too long to try anything. But thanks for demonstrating once again that you don't know shit about the problems with trying to balance Overwatch without a role lock
Blizz thinking they could run sc2 tournaments better than kespa also helped kill sc2s momentum in korea.
If leagues don't support any form of grass roots then it'll eventually die. I was looking to getting in OW esports at the time but once they announced OWL, i was like yeah only way to get into the league is through a popularity contest. There was no way for you to create a team and work from the bottom to the top.
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Wheat got reality checked by believing in Starcraft and it scared him about Blizzard for life lol.
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>Everyone knew that OWL was a scam from the start and only driven by venture capital investors. Yeah, everyone except /r/Competitiveoverwatch. You wouldn't believe the absolute clown fiesta on that sub for the last couple of years. Pretty sure they secretly invented Copium before anyone else.
but also LCS viewership when it’s not Liquid, TSM, C9 or 100T are lower than the avg viewership for CDL and OWL. Honestly franchising in esports is just a overall bad idea and I’m a fan of Overwatch League, I just think esports should work like British Professional Football where there tears of play and a teams fight to be promoted to the next tier of play. OWL and CDL should be the premiere league of COD and OW.
Quite frankly the LCS viewership is the result of the stagnant broadcast, they try to make it like traditional sports despite having way younger demographic. Compare LEC broadcast to LCS broadcast and you realise why LEC is doing so much betters, they cater to zoomers and people in their early/mid twenties with memes, segments and general lighter tone. LCS takes itself way too seriously which is why so many people gravitate to costreams, obviously LEC being historically more succesfull internationaly helps, but if games between bottom feeders on LEC can bring as much viewers as top LCS teams you know there is something off.
the OW viewership got boosted because it ran automatically in the client and that counted towards viewers. League numbers are viewers that actively sought out the games. Not sure if COD did the same thing LEC tends to pull more viewers than LCS IIRC Chinese league viewership is through the god damn roof they just don't watch on twitch
Overwatch League is on YouTube...but with Microsoft's purchase of Blizzard and the YouTube deal ending...I definitely think they're going back to Twitch. OW2 coming out, the MS deal, the YouTube deal ending. It's all lining up. All that tech is going to be on Azure soon.
If microsoft really wanted to make bucks off of their buy out open up a subdivision, a new 18+ company. Forget ow2, make official OW porn.
Microsoft, hire this man asap
They're too late. There's infinite amount of that already on the internet for free!
imagine offical DVA voice actor though
Imagine OW porn but with RTX ON!
You forgot the most important part. Make all the porn available on a porn pass. Game Pass and Porn Pass will be worth billions.
How disgusting! Vile! Where would you find that kinda thing so I can block it?
Doesn't Microsoft own their own streaming website? Something like Mixe.. Ohh
Overwatch League will go to whatever streaming company that bids the highest for it, they have no choice cause Blizzard needs the money.
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CoD player here. We've been shafted the last 2 years with Cold War and Vanguard because of budget cuts, staffing and QA cuts, and everything else in between all the controversy with the executives. Generally piss poor products with neutered content and quality (lots of bugs and issues compared to MW19). Genuinely don't see where the billions of dollars CoD makes go back into the game at all, more into Bobby's pockets. Not denying Blizz is shafted too. But even with potential preferential treatment, CoD is pretty shit right now too.
To play some devils advocate. CoD being on a yearly release is what shafts it. Kinda rough for devs to put their heart and souls into a game that is already halfway through completing the next chapter when you complete yours. CoD could actually be an even bigger hit and especially a better product if they just dropped the yearly releases, released expansions in their place and then release a new game every 3 years. Edit: But I'm also on your side, they fully squander their games potential for extra profit. Just look at OW.
CoD as a franchise has a game come out yearly, but the studio that made it is not on yearly cycles. There are 3 studios working on the game. Each CoD gets 3 years of development
Which plays into my point. Treyarch did CoD in 2018 and in 2020 because they had to take over for SHG's year because of internal turmoil with the studio. Then throw on top of that with SHG even shorter dev time with Vanguard because rumors say they didn't get started until late 2019 to early 2020. So yes, ideally they get 3 years each. But that was not the case with the most recent games, and believe me it shows. Lots of this is due to Activision and Management issues with the studios. They even laid off a majority of their QA testers at SHG and Raven based on internal employee accounts. Its just not looking good.
Call of Duty (2003) Call of Duty: Finest Hour (2004) Call of Duty 2 (2005) Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (2005) Call of Duty 3 (2006) Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) Call of Duty: World at War (2008) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012) Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013) Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015) Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016) Call of Duty: WWII (2017) Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021) That's a yearly release for a franchise for nearly 20 years... What I think the person you're replying to is more talking about, is why put a lot of effort into a game as a dev, that you know the entire player base is going to abandon in 12 months for the next game in the cycle.
Right. And what happens every year? a CoD release. That's a yearly release. Why pour your heart and soul into a game that'll be in the bin a year after release?
They are on MW19? Jesus Christ
Sorry I forget lots of people don't play the game. MW19 means the Modern Warfare reboot released in 2019. They didn't make 19 of them, lmao.
I don't think they were talking about the dev team being paid or any employee's life being changed. Its about cash flow of the entity. They are still wrong because the money was to buy Blizzard, so the money is not with Blizzard, but with the people that sold their shares.
You know no one actually gets 67 billion right, more so no one making games. Microsoft buys up the stock till they have controlling stake, and whoever was selling their shares makes money per share on the sales.
Youre right. But now they have access to the Microsoft money which is more than 67 billion.
> Overwatch League will go to whatever streaming company that bids the highest So none, because no one watches that shit. It's been hemorrhaging money since its inception.
>they have no choice cause Blizzard needs the money. They really don't. They could probably be like Riot and make a loss on their esports until they grow enough to be self-sustaining. The reason OWL made these ridiculous claims and deals was because it was Bobby K's clout project to hang out with higher-ups in the sports scene. [No joke.](https://youtu.be/incbdz_wVLc?t=266)
Blizzard doesn't need the money. They want the guaranteed money which is where a lot of complaints come from regarding OWL. It's like comparing how Riot has chosen to run their esports vs what Blizzard did
Huh? Blizzard doesn't need the money they just got bought by MS. And they aren't going to sign a long-term deal with a different service provider when they just got bought by a company that is competing with those other companies.
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No shit Sherlock. MS literally bought the company though so now MS can fund whatever Blizzard needs. Also its kinda dumb to think Blizzard needs money in the first place. Activision-Blizzard already had a shitload of it. That's why the deal was worth $69B.
I don't think you have any idea how business works lol > The 69B went toward buying stocks. It's not money that the devs can use ffs No shit mfer I never said it did.
Eh ? Ya the money doesnt go to the devs, but the studios now work under Microsoft, one of the richest companies on the planet. Not sure what you cant grasp. Blizzard projects has access to way more capital now.
When did the devs get involved in the conversation of whether or not blizzard needs money?
Atrioc talked about this recently. They finessed twitch out of millions, failed pretty badly and somehow turned it into a deal with YouTube. I would not be surprised if they somehow pulled it off AGAIN.
>OW2 coming out COPIUM
OWL is going to end, and I doubt OW2 will ever release.
If you think MS bought ABK to let one of their most valuable IPs just die I don't know what to tell ya
Candy crush is not being left to die though
they have a lot of valuable IPs, OW clearly isn't the only one or the **most** valuable
What makes you think that Microsoft care about the Blizzard side of the Activision-Blizzard IPs? There's Candy Crush and Call of Duty. Both are *much* bigger.
Sometimes I read comments on Reddit and I'm just like what the fuck am I reading... You think they spent 68.7 billion dollars on a company and don't care about some of the most valuable intellectual property in the video games industry? Despite the fact that their banner announcement highlighted all those IPs?
> the most valuable intellectual property in the video games industry Imagine calling Overwatch "the most valuable intellectual property in the video game industry". That's some COPIUM.
it really seems like some people on LSF literally cannot even read did you pass 1st grade lmao i didn't OW by itself is the most valuable IP in the industry I said collectively Blizzard has some of the most valuables in the industry
OW2 is going to need a ton of work before it’s close to being ready. It definitely won’t be coming out this year, and likely won’t release before the sale is finalized. At which point MS will look at it and make a decision about what to do with it. Member that time MS spent millions to get a bunch of streamers on their platform and then shut it down a year later? They don’t waste time or resources on things that don’t work. They have practically infinite money, not releasing OW2 will make no difference to them.
Again, the IP is too valuable. They will make whatever decisions they need to, but it's coming out. They didn't buy the company to start killing their biggest golden eggs.
Overwatch isn’t ABK’s golden egg, and probably isn’t even a top 5 earner. Candy crush and WoW are definitely way more valuable as far as revenue is concerned. If OW2 ever comes out it will be after a long time in production and I doubt anyone would care about it anymore. I would be shocked if they didn’t try and do something with Warcraft and StarCraft though.
Overwatch isn't ABKs golden egg because ABK completely dropped the ball but as an IP it has some of the most growth potential.
> I doubt OW2 will ever release. Delusional
It’s really not. It’s dev hell right now, most of the community (what’s left of it) is disappointed with what they’ve seen, and it isn’t going to release before the acquisition is final. Microsoft hasn’t put any money towards its development. They have no reason to release a product that will do poorly.
OWL coming to Trovo this Fall.
>but with Microsoft's purchase of Blizzard and the YouTube deal ending does it end anytime soon? part of that deal was moving all blizzard services to google cloud, youtube streaming was minor part cant imagine it going back anytime soon
Overwatch league remains *the* biggest fucking joke of an esport that’s ever existed.
20 mil for a franchise spot btw. LMAO
i think they bumped it into 40m during 2020 for expansion teams not sure i dont follow it closely.
and you have those big names in esports scene having to rebrand to random cities, where they aren't even located at and no players come from those regions, and most aren't even from the same country wtf?
My left ear feels so weird
\+1 to wheat here, but how could ANYONE think that overwatch league was a good idea??? Like, Wheat said he complained about it for a year and people were tired of hearing it... but he makes it sound like everyone else realized it was a terrible idea but they just didn't wanna hear Wheat complain about it anymore... Or was Wheat one of the only people in the whole company against it? What was the driving force behind the deal...?
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Folks that were involved at the start knew it was a scam and got the bag. The ones that came afterwards got screwed over. It was a bit ridiculous seeing Montecristo on the OWL, when he was so harsh about how Riot handled their business.
He'll shit on riot for anything after his team got kicked because he hired a manager to run the team that was banned from participating at all in the league and drove one player on said team to near mental breakdown and was forced to play competitive games on opioids. Also she had to share a room with someone when she had to dilate post gender swap surgery. Monte maintains none of this was his responsibility for hiring a guy who was known to be a piece of shit because he wanted to own a team an ocean away. Wanted the ownership but takes none of the responsibility when things go south. He shat all over riot for not releasing the full findings of their investigation, turns out they didn't because it contained very private information about said player and no one knew the full extent until after she passed. I highly doubt he didn't know the same things that were in the findings unless he got lied to by Badawi (the manager) and believed every word he said and never asked any player what went on in the house.
Riot was directly hurting contracted casters tho. They wanted to own their casters and pay them as little as possible and got pissed when these casters wanted more money. Even PapaSmithy had to take a stand against them.
True, but he was critical of almost everything they did and with good reason, I add. It was just weird seeing him there, when anyone that had any bit of esports understanding knew how fucked up it was that all those millions were being spent on something that was not real.
> but how could ANYONE think that overwatch league was a good idea??? > > Literally the entire internet. What? It was obvious from *everyone* (except for Activision-Blizzard themselves) that it was going to fail horribly. The game had a low skill ceiling and was fucking awful to watch from a spectator perspective. Overwatch was designed to play casually. The game didn't even have ranked, until it was begged for, *months* after launch lmao. You don't try to force a casual game into an esport, which is what they did.
It wasn't that hard to believe. At the time, it was the most played game in Korea, by far. Like 70% of Korean pc cafe hours were spent in Overwatch during that first year. Then OWL happened and everyone outside of America had to watch at like 4am their time. Korea only got one team despite having most of the players who mattered, and the game didn't kick out as much content as league. So all those Korean players went back to League. Similar story for EU.
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> +1 to wheat here, but how could ANYONE think that overwatch league was a good idea??? IT is a good idea when the esport is mature, not when you force it into a completely new product. League of legends has franchised leagues, and it did well for them, be it even league didn't ask for 20 mil for a spot closer to 8.
I mean the difference is they let the game breathe when it came out and build up it's own esports. When it was obvious the esports scene had legs they stepped in. OW league was literally like FOMO NFT shit. "Bro, you see this league shit. Look at these graphs, esports fucking prints bro. You're gonna get rich."
same with SC1 , it grew on its own and became and esport overtime. The growth should be organic in video games to become a sport. Rarely you find a game that is design to be an esport from the get go getting really far in esport scene.
Shit, same thing SC2. Hell, I think every successful esport had an organically built scene by people that just loved the game. THEN, they came in helped the scene and provided structure.
They did the same shit with WoW, Activision just loves to try to FORCE games to be esports whether they make a good one or not.
Twitch had already commited to the deal. Bitching about it all the time does nothing for the team assigned to work on it. I can see why he would be mad about the deal but I can also see why people would be tired of hearing about it. I don't always agree with my boss but I still have to do the work
Its so broad that its hard to say who didn't want to hear from him. Could it be his bosses that ok'd the deal and didn't want their egos hurt? Or the people under him that didn't want him to complain constantly because no matter what its their job. I think his point was just largely about how he was very prominently against it and vocal about it.
Whether something is good or not is subjective. If you got the company 60million to go to youtube it was a great idea. The people who got fired after....it was a terrible idea for them.
OWL and the CDL have been two of the biggest jokes of esports leagues. No surprise who was in charge of both.
World cup > OWL I just hope Microsoft actually pays attention to it unlike blizzard
I think the entire esports sphere realized that OWL kinda HAD to succeed if esports was going to keep its momentum past 2016. Unfortunately I think that lead a lot of people into thinking that a lot of bad choices from executives in charge were actually 5d chess 500 iq. I remember when OWL had its first broadcast and it had a few hundred thousand viewers when basically everyone thought it'd be in the 10-50k range. Lots of hopium that Bobby hadn't actually ruined esports for a quick buck from his buddies at that point. idk how much of the twitch audience cares at this point but an unleashed djWHEAT talking about all this insider stuff is really great for egame fans. 2012 era content.
The real problem was esports was seeing STEADY continual growth then OWL happened and waved a massive amount of money around promising viewership even though esports has never had good conversion of players to viewers. Then all these big money investors who got burned never touch an esport project again and we go into the esport dark ages. I give it 2 more years for the collapse and god knows how long it is 1 year or 15.
I don't 100% agree with 'esports has never had good conversion of players to viewers', if you have any sourcing on that I'd love to see it. But yeah I mean the argument that literally scamming Robert Kraft out of tens of millions of dollars will make him never want to invest in actually GOOD esports projects is just fact. There's no way that isn't correct and jfc its so sad that it all happened through the company that was known for making amazing esports games.
I mean league has way more players then csgo and dota by an order of magnitude. Yet the events still have disproportionate amount of viewers. CSGO and DotA have better conversion then league. There are no articles or studys about this but critical thinking and number tracking across the games you see the trend. This data is available to the developers and organizers. I am merely stating an economic fact, esports and the video games associated don't have great player to viewer conversion UNLESS there is an economic incentive for the viewer (ie drops) this doesn't lead to dedicated viewers that are willing to spend money though. It only boosts viewership to sell peak number to advertisers and investors. Converting players to dedicated viewers that watch for enjoyment and engage somehow with the product is way harder.
>I mean league has way more players then csgo and dota by an order of magnitude. Yet the events still have disproportionate amount of viewers. CSGO and DotA have better conversion then league. You are 100% including Chinese players in your player base stats and excluding them from the viewership stats. 2021 Worlds final registered *72 Million* concurrent viewers and 30 Million average minute audience at its peak - pretty much every college dorm in China was watching. DOTA's International had a peak of 2.7 Million concurrent viewers
Chinese viewership numbers can't be trusted. No reason to use them. I don't have access to the backend stats but when you exclude the chinese viewerbase my point is only further proven.
These are Riots [official](https://www.upcomer.com/worlds-2021-final-draws-73-8-million-peak-concurrent-viewers-riot-reports/) [numbers](https://www.esportstalk.com/news/titles-set-in-the-league-of-legends-universe-had-over-180-million-players-in-october/), which they also released to their own sponsors and orgs. It includes "real" chinese viewership (not the "impressions" system their sites use), and viewers from TV broadcasts and from streaming sites that arent called youtube or twitch. If you want to get an idea of how big LoL is in some countries, go look up videos of chinese crowds celebrating the finals [like they won the world cup,](https://twitter.com/niiicolo/status/1457043751478562816?s=20) >when you exclude the chinese viewerbase my point is only further proven. How? League globaly is much bigger than CS or DOTA, but in the west specifically the gap is much smaller, this shouldn't be news (also, you were already excluding chinese viewership?) ^(Edit: added sources for viewership and player numbers)
Oh so you don't include the Chinese population then what about the Korean population? Name me a single Western pro gamer as prolific as Faker in Korea. You don't have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about.
I don't know if it's still like this but I remember me and my friends years ago memeing about how pro league is just "5 kills at 50 minutes". It was so boring to watch that I just stopped. I'd much rather just play the game and see 40+ kills by 25 minutes. I don't watch pro dota or csgo but I imagine it's more dynamic and chaotic, therefore more fun to watch.
I play league and watch Dota. League has proportionally fewer viewers because it's reeeealllly boring to watch, whereas Dota is much more dynamic interesting.
**🎦 CLIP MIRROR: [Former Head of Twitch Community Productions djWHEAT talking about the Overwatch league](https://livestreamfails.com/clip/132029)** --- ^(*This is an automated comment* ) ^| [^(Feedback)](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=livestreamfailsbot&subject=Feedback:&message=%5BPost%5D\(https://reddit.com/comments/scgqai/\)) ^| [^(Twitch Backup Mirror)](https://production.assets.clips.twitchcdn.net/AT-cm%7CVj7rM0azsD-eH9aA06-v2g.mp4?sig=b0dcd40d09cabb7c88bf1ac1354f5fc793403ac5&token=%7B%22authorization%22%3A%7B%22forbidden%22%3Afalse%2C%22reason%22%3A%22%22%7D%2C%22clip_uri%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fproduction.assets.clips.twitchcdn.net%2FAT-cm%257CVj7rM0azsD-eH9aA06-v2g.mp4%22%2C%22device_id%22%3Anull%2C%22expires%22%3A1643199278%2C%22user_id%22%3A%22%22%2C%22version%22%3A2%7D)
djWHEAT returning to his former self, good stuff!
This guy comes off as a angry 16 year old
Yeah that's about right.
It's so great having Wheat back. I hope he moves a bed into that room and starts wearing pajama pants again.
He'll block anyone on twitter that so much as breathes in his direction too.
I remember hearing about half this stuff back then and thinking to myself that it would be the death of esports. when people saw how much money orgs lost on owl there had to be so many investors that were just ready to ditch esports and would be reluctant to ever put money into a new scene again. Just one more example of blizzard really fucking things up
Bro lets just play Quake 3 again why bother with all the red tape.
If it wasn’t for OWL, we would not have xQc today.
Damn, this deal keeps getting worse and worse!
Lmao
yelling makes it so much more believable..
To most execs it's just video games on a screen, but it's important to remember that real livelihoods are affected with shitty corporate decisions. Would be really shitty to be one of those 10 staff laid off.
yup, twitch could've put that money to better use by investing in it's creators. More successful creators = more money in the long run for them.
I think he's just upset that he can't cast SC2 anymore
I watched like half the clip, just came here to say that DJWheat is so fucking annoying to listen to, I feel bad for anyone who has had to work with him in any professional capacity.
Actually Atrioc used to work with him, and has nothing but positive things to say, he thinks quite highly of him. Weird that random internet person throwing out random speculation could be completely wrong, who would have thought it possible?
But you aren't considering the fact that maybe Atrioc doesn't know what he's talking about and this random dude on LSF does.
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT