Shocking but not surprising new developments from Overwatch League; teams are incredibly unhappy with how the League has been performing.
Overwatch doesn’t seem off to a hot start this year…
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This is great to hear!
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Blizzard:
Step 1) Identify what your customers want.
Step 2) Do the opposite
Step 3)???
Step 4) Lose millions of dollars because nobody wants to play a game where the decision makers are exclusively interested in being adversarial towards their customers.
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Not surprising. Blizzard made some mighty aggressive claims with the launch of OWL, and convinced several investors to buy in for a hefty chunk of money. The promised returns haven’t materialized, and many of the investors still owe franchise fees to Blizzard. Blizzard has been suspending franchise payments due to various circumstances.
But that doesn’t mean franchise fee payables aren’t accruing. The franchisees are probably realizing they need to start renegotiating now before Activision management changes or the payable gets too large.
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This is more the common business strategy of american companies these days.
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That is good news.
Hope the owl teams get out of it and get compensated.
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Heh
Probably better they don’t kill off their ladder playerbase chasing after an esports style that tries to mimic sports, but ignores esport standards.
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Inevitable step 5 is to shut the servers down and kill the game rather than admit mistakes and change
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as a big fan of the overwatch league I’m very sad to hear this…
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Good to know that blizzard is not mismanaging only its community.
Also I hope some better rewards for watching comes out from this at least.
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This was completely foreseeable when they wanted a million dollars down for creating a team, instead of organically forming some type of esport. I for 1 lost interest when they started kicking people off OWL. I don’t need to vested in teams that have a revolving door of players, I usually follow the players not the team.
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Bankrupt e-sport leagues: When greedy suits can’t even properly budget a video feed + LAN party.
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never cared for the overwatch league much anyway but you think blizzard wouldnt need sponsors and could finance the league because… of the free-to-play model? shop skin funds didnt get allocated to that huh… probably to bobby’s pockets and investors lol
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Shocking
gee who could have possibly forseen the Overwatch League being a dismal failure
totally worth prioritising 50 “professionals” over MILLIONS OF PAYING CUSTOMERS for 5 years
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OWL was already having problems:
- Too much money required for a show that repays itself not through a fandom (dropped drastically after the discontent of the home product) but only through drops and the sale of unique skins;
- Too much savings on money dedicated to travel. the housing and gaming stations of the players in Hawaii have caused a particular scandal, and obviously the covid and the passport restrictions of various players have not improved the situation;
- scandals that caused the sponsors to flee, but already many commentators of the tournament had already been wary of proposing themselves to the tournament;
- obvious stress from the players to balance the game around the trend of the OWL. it became obvious when the 2nd OW2 Beta was just to release JQ in OWL instead of analyzing the game in other real home exclusive features (arcade balance or clan system, for example);
- In 2020 (we all remember it) it was the year in which Blizzard spent too much time reworking the rules to be followed between one week and the next, also stressing the pro players with the 2-2-2 and the hero pool;
People aren’t stupid: we’re all tired of seeing poor home service and an overly pampered OWL… and then the game isn’t even mentioned among the best e-sports at the Game Awards. Such useless efforts only for a completely exclusive show for Blizzard and not at all dedicated first to the quality in the game. Obviously now we are all very skeptical about the validity of OWL with the absence of the game in China (just think of how many teams and players in that country). or the ever growing lack of European interest in the tournament which hurts European teams who have PAID and instead find themselves very uncomfortable with the organization (especially in tournament times). and Blizzard continues to profit both from players frustrated by monetization and from teams who want to organize a real e-sports game but do not receive the attention of the public (too stressed by blizzard itself).
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all of that plus it just doesn’t work as a spectator sport
football works cos you can keep your eye on one thing: the football
now imagine football with 12 footballs
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My question is how OWL teams are going to make a case that OWL didn’t fail due to mismanagement and poor choices.
Not to mention top-down balancing where blizz balanced mostly based off OWL. You know that one OWL season between beta and launch when nobody but owl players had access to the game?
There’s also the argument that teams could’ve self policed their own meta. Instead they forced devs to control how professional players win matches.
I’m going to have to side with blizz on this one.
Edit: It’s not that I’m on a “team”. It’s just more entertaining than the actual game because I like the morbidity and irony. I believe both the OWL teams and blizz is incompetent.
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“Best we can do is an old spray and a souvenir of a pepperoni pizza. Take it or leave it.”
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"Lets also devalue OWL tokens by making stuff more expensive and increase their prices too. "
“Lets not even deliver the tokens for watching when we are on it”
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