Overwatch League: Two Seasons and a Legacy

What is a legacy in eSports? Any major DOTA 2 or League of Legends fan will tell you about their biggest fan moments, of a single player or a specific roster that changed the landscape of the game, if only temporarily. But rosters change, these teams move, shuffle, get bought out, go bankrupt, etc. There is no real stability in eSports the way there is in traditional sports. There’s no player’s associations, no unionization efforts, and it’s not surprising. Despite being a billion-dollar range industry, eSports is highly unregulated. “Drama” in eSports, or fraud as the rest of the world calls it, occurs on the regular. Tournaments that boast large prizes are sometimes found out to have never paid out the prizes, teams renege on basic contractual tenants, and threaten to sue players into being silent about their mistreatment. 

But what if it could be different? What if they could organize a league where there were rules and regulations about Player and Teams conduct between each other, the public, and to the league itself. What if accountability was a real thing, held by bylaws, regulations, and contract minimums. No more fees laying in contracts like bear traps for supposed payouts to players. Real sponsors that could trust that the League would uphold a standard of conduct that could bring in big brands, like Coca-Cola, Budweiser. etc. 

Blizzard-Activision did that with the formation of the Overwatch League… or, rather, they have attempted to do so. For the most part, they’ve succeeded in changing how eSports is built, choosing to forgo the traditional eSports way of doing business. Rather than organizations with their niche names, like Ninjas-In-Pajamas, OpTic, or EnvyUS (teams owned by brands that the general public had no clue about), Blizzard organized a location-based set-up, with each team representing a city. The initial twelve teams were based out of locations commonly associated with sports teams such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and more. Even teams from the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were assembled (Seoul, South Korea, Shanghai, China, London, England), creating the reality of a worldwide league.

This gave the league a feeling of legitimacy – a feeling that, if this worked, it could change eSports forever. In many ways it has, but not all for the better. With the formation of the OWL, the common acronym of the Overwatch League, smaller events struggled to form competitions, especially after Blizzard sent branding and tournament guidelines. A team lost its right to use its local city in its branding and name. While the Tier 2 scene was unified under the “Contenders” brand, it’s received little to no support, with player and team complaints rising. It’s a new frontier Blizzard is treading, bringing civilization to the wild west of eSports. There’s nobody who has tried to do it quite like this before. 

Many called season one of OWL a success, but it was constantly analyzed and compared to other eSport streams and audience sizes. Accusations of paid stadium audiences and inflated stream numbers were so prevalent, they became a meme. However, it also brought on partnership deals with Disney, with matches regularly shown on its Disney XD, ESPN, and even ABC broadcasting channels. Brand deals with Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Toyota, State Farm, T-Mobile, and other billion-dollar brands were established, creating some of the most lucrative branding deals in eSports. This wasn’t Nvidia sponsoring a $10,000 prize pool tournament. Season One ended with a $3.5 Million dollar prize pool split over stages, with the season Grand Finals being $1 Million for first and $500,000 for second place. Season Two brought the prize pool up to $5 Million. 

Season Three is slated to be even higher, with each team hosting games in their own venues. Season Two expanded the teams from twelve to twenty, including three new Chinese based teams. While no new teams are being added for Season Three, with the focus being on the shift from the single stadium production to the road production, more changes are sure to come our way. With the creation of the Call of Duty World League, also owned by Blizzard-Activision in an attempt to prove the science behind the shift, the next year will likely determine the future of eSports as we know it. 

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said… It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

-Ray Bradbury