OWL is boring as hell to watch. Who watches it?
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“bUt iTs dOiNg wElL iN cHiNa”
" vIEwEr nUmBeRs aRe jUsT fInE"
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Blizz deserves it but i feel bad for all the athletes and coaches involved. So much rebranding and setting a HQ on the other half of the planet just to be in a huge deficit due to outside reasons.
It made me wonder if there are any news about whether China will still allow Battle Net from Season 3. I remember there was something.
Hopefully it’s shut down and we can finally start making the game FUN. 
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Blizzard probably thought that artificially inflating the viewship with drops would fool the sponsors into thinking OWL is widely watched. It only fools blizzard’s cultists into thinking it is a widely watched e-sport.
So this is beginning of the end of OWL, Good. It wasnt born in a natural way so it deserves to die a traumatic death so maybe blizzard will learn not to force an e-sport into their casual games.
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Yeah, I think marketing and corporate got involved with this and it showed when OWL basically consisted of a JQ metagame for every team.
And that’s actually been a huge problem with OWL since the 2/2/2 format and the discovery of GOATS. There’s literally no variety or team variation, basically falling into the same problems SC2 had with Protoss vs. Protoss in stale metagames and generally weak options and only a single path towards success.
Saw this coming back in season 4, but it’s happening faster than the 3 years past OW2 that I gave it, and this will probably kill the game. Activision Blizzard isn’t gonna simply kill OWL while also investing more into the game itself. It’ll be shoved into maintenence mode and have prices jacked up to milk people while they can still get away with it.
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They might realize they make a game for end consumers, with these hints?
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Running full korean teams and complaining about no money.
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yup.
honestly AVB needs the fail to be brought back to reality.
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You say that like pro player from US or other countries would be cheaper.
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The one thing everyone predicted happening months ago and miles away.
I kinda of feel bad because when you cut out all the greedy people and “bad touchers”, the IP is in quite the struggle and I don’t want it to fail. I honestly want it to be good, just to stop making mistake after mistake constantly. It’s concerning the whole thing is breaking and I am worried what’s going to happen IF Microsoft is able to grab the pieces. If.
h ttps://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-faces-eu-antitrust-warning-over-activision-deal-sources-2023-01-16/
I just want more people involved after so many were lost or just for their team to get some help. Because so many L’s just means improvement is all that harder.
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So it seems like this is already happening. They are milking old skins and the events are very simple and low effort.
It is indeed happening faster than even the most gloomy doomer would have predicted. I did expect owl to end, just not this soon, and as much as it wasn’t officially stated that we are entering maintance mode, season 2 is looking like the beginning of it.
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…this is the issue with ‘forcing’ an esport vs letting it evolve naturally over time. Blizzard have a history of doing this too (HotS)… 
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True. Even Valorant let its pro scene develop, mostly, on its own. The only intervention was by offering guidelines for pro play.
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This is best news that hit Overwatch in a long time. Hopefully it wont be long until the league dissolves and the game’s priority can once again be “make this game fun!” And not a heaven for sweaty tryhard wanna-be e-sport pros.
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OW2 is not a spectator sport for the general public.
Almost every single successful Esport and sport in general is slow with flurry of activity.
LoL slow build up then action
Football, build up then action
CS Slow, then lots of action
OW2 is just constant action all the time, so much that you can’t follow anything.
It just looks like a complete mess of a game for most people, it’s extreamly niche. Is niche what they want?
I doubt it.
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Blizzard built this game to be an esport, I truly believe they’d let the game die if OWL collapsed. They’ll do whatever they have to do to keep it up. And after reading the article, this sounds less of “OWL being cancelled” and more of “teams just want Blizzard to help them out a bit more because it’s not financially sustainable for them”.
And aren’t all esports really running on a loss? The only esport I can truly see making profit is League of Legends.
So love it or hate it, OWL is a necessity to keep OW alive.
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Well, OW was at its peak when it was a fun casual and polished alternative to Team fortress2.
It started its downfall the more it leaned to morph the game into an e-sport.
OWL isnt all profits, it is a costly endeavor to keep it running. Blizz execs would rather axe it and leave the game to have its calm cash shop profits than the chaos of dealing with angry sponsors, team managers and e-atheles.
Maybe even the higher-ups will be happy to hear it is over. It was a failed attempt at making their e-sport. I know blizzard has been seething in rage ever since let the moba genre slip through their fingers when it was right there on their own Warcraft3.
But OW wasnt the franchise to be turned into an e-sport, it was a grave mistake.
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