They aren’t changing to it because that’s where the money is. Blizzard practically started Esports. You know how long they have been making competitive games?
Thats why games from 10+ years ago are still strong today. It hasn’t just been a recent thing for them to start doing Esport games. Overwatch was designed for it. Just like all there games are.
Based on a quick google search, the lowest reported viewership across all 3 platforms they stream on was 133k average viewers in stage 3. Let me know when xQc has more than that pls.
Like with the “40 Million sold copies” numbers, this one too is utterly worthless, because it obscures the fact that they artificially inflated them by handing out skins and <bs_currency_02>.
Wonder how many “viewers” they would lose, if they didn’t make certain ingame stuff attainable only by “watching”.
OWL is a success?? Are you from a parallel world?
OWL has objectively been a massive success. Aside from being great for the game in general (a growing player base three years into an FPS is not normal), it’s been huge for gaming in general. The grand finals of season 1 were on prime time ESPN on a Friday night, which is crazy on its own. It was pretty awesome. I had family and friends who don’t know anything about gaming asking me about Overwatch just as a result of that.
Financially, the eight new expansion teams paid between 20 and 30 million dollars EACH just to get spots in the league. As of today, Coca Cola, Toyota, T-Mobile, and others have signed on as sponsors.
This forum needs to recognize that OWL is the best thing there is for keeping this game active, growing, and heavily-supported. People denying its success just because they don’t like it don’t make sense to me. It really just makes them look ignorant.
Considering this is the now 3rd attempt at one… I don’t think OWL will last all that long. If you don’t know anything about the game it’s hard to follow and it was successful because many gave it the “first season” shot and tuned in. Many people have said they’re not tuning in for the second season and many of the bigger names have now dropped out.
This.
The idea of an esport for OW could be good, but the game is too unfinshed for an esport. I dont mind the balance changes made to OWL just dont leech every resource from the basic game and be so deep in denial about the games current state.
League is NOT a success. Infact it SPLIT the community UP and took the player base OUT.
If they wanted to have league they should have built a seperate system called 'League rules" which was the adjustments they made for the game. I went to a 1,000+ chair gaming Convention that Had Overwatch and there was something along the lines called “Swiss rules to the game”. I never heard of that, but there was an ADJUSTMENT made so that way there was NO KILL CAM. I played the overwatch matches. They were fun. If they want to have their game keep the casual player base and the League base they will have to implement Handicap changes. If not, this will end just as badly as what Arena adjustments did to the casual player base on World of Wacraft. no joke ![:open_mouth:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/open_mouth.png?v=6" ":open_mouth:")
The only split is between people who want the game to be casual because they assumed it was meant to be and people who want it to be competitive. OWL based on money is a succes and that’s really the only relevant thing for them to base it on.
I don’t really understand what your point is with the rest of your post.
You can’t make a game have a competitive scene before the release. It needs a playerbase, or at the very least frequent balance changes. Most popular e-sports games had a dedicated community first, not “we want to be big”. Many modern games say “we want to have a competitive scene” even before the game gets released, like really, your game isn’t ready yet, nobody played it, how can you wish of an e-sports scene if your game isn’t even finished?
the competitive mode just wasn’t finished for release
It had an e-sport scene practically right away
Lol.
I don’t care about OWL. That being said, I agree with this. If they want OWL to be successful they also need to up their game for the actual player base. I think all your bottom ideas are good. I just don’t know if Blizzard cares enough about their player base to make the game better and evolve it. They are too slow with balance changes and break or add broken heroes into the game. I just think that if the player base knows off the bat what kinda meta or strength a new hero has or notices bugs right away, it’s kinda crappy when theres not changes right off the bat. For example the Sym bugs after her rework were there for months and it didn’t get changed (although I noticed some were patched up) and Brig right off the bat I was like “shes going to be triple support so maybe triple tank will happen”. (there were a lot of things that were obvious with Brig from ptr). It just takes the Devs so long and either they don’t notice because they aren’t playing the game or don’t care. In other games these things get changed quickly so there really is no excuse.
nuh Apex is already finding players for teams so this isn’t 100% true.
The entire e-sports experience should be closely tied to the gameclient tbh.
Tournaments like the open division should be directly advertised and a menu-slot in the client.
I don’t know whether that would face legal problems, but OWL doesnt get any closer to its potential viewers if it doesnt try to get closer to its potential viewers.
here are my thoughts on the matter
i personally don’t but apparently it consistently has like 80-90K viewers
I’d say an average of 10,000 viewers not counting streams in different languages (especially china) us a success
I’ve said this before and i say it again:
If game is nothing without e-sport, it shouldn’t have it.
I have no interest to use e-sport software. I’m here to play a video game.
Just saying.
I would disagree and say that Overwatch as a game was ever really successful because it was casual, and not because it was competitive. It succeeded in drawing in the crowd that normally don’t play competitive titles. Or FPS.
But I do agree that the money pumped into the OWL and the fact that it still makes the occasional headlines is really the only reason OW the game is even remotely relevant as a game today.
T…Tony Stark, is that you? 
I’m glad you understood the reference.
Seriously though, that one sentence is just perfect for getting my point across.